Metaphor Fetishism
Digging into Domain Driven Design I came across this article by Eric Evans where he talks about the phenomena of metaphor-mania in the software development community.
For some reason developers love to apply metaphor/similie to what they do: software is like the construction industry; software is manufacturing; software is writing/authorship; development should be like cooking with a recipe; et. al.
Eric says software “is what it is” - a unique discipline. Certainly parts of development resemble more established and known activities/industries but development is its own animal. If software’s a “kingdom” there certainly are very distinct “phyla” under that: enterprise apps, games, embeded, etc. Sure there might be a strain of underlying DNA, but the lifeforms are certainly distinct and wildly different.
There I go with the metaphor…
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