A Man and a Software

By Dr. Tariq Javid

A man is born, grow and die. This is true for a software as well which is born, grow and die. How one can relate a man with a software? How a software fits in a man's space? How a man fits in a software's space? these are few questions of interest to deal here.

A man stands for a human being. The birth is a complex process and the result is often happiness to the parents. The software development is also a complex process with a usual result of happiness for the programmer(s). The competition begins at an early stage for both and lost till end. As the time flow cannot be reversed or reset; we usually observe number of related common facts. These contain both successes and failures. The obvious conclusion from similarities is; we can relate a man and software.

The success part:
- getting strong, stable
- gathering information, storing
- attaining a level of maturity
- earning reputation and money
- providing benefits, enabling business
- leading market, feature rich

The failure part:
- gaining experience, multiple failures/recoveries
- lacking behind, short of new features
- degrading health, increasing errors
- facing disasters, partial recoveries
- vanishing controls

However, there are dissimilarities. These include:
- different environment and growing spaces
- emotions and executions
- unpredictable and deterministic responses
- imagination and computation powers

Profoundly, a man enjoys life actively in a specific time period. A software also functions as required for a specific period of time. Mostly a man is a user of a software which is developed by a man to use as a tool by fellow men. Obviously, the use depends on features provided by the software. The software fits in man's space as a tool; for example, a web browser.

Initially, a software do not has any knowledge of its user. Actually, it do not need to. What it has is a set of default settings or preferences. Most of the time a man or a user can modify these. Few software have specific code to record user inputs and update default preferences. Thus a man fits in a software's space generally as a user of the tool. The tool may adjust itself to serve its man, the user. Just as the right tool is required for the job well done; a careful and wise selection of the tool is very important.

Here we have related a man and a software, observed few similarities (success and failure parts) and dissimilarities; and discussed their interactions.