Software does evolve - as we’ve seen many times in the past projects to do a wholesale replacement of large projects tend to fail spectacularly (the Netscape example being the most prominent).
Large projects do evolve - new parts are added over time, old parts are dropped, and individual parts are rewritten, generally in a piecemeal fashion.
The environment selects for some features (say memory protection, which won - OSs either evolved it independently or died out), and select against others (OSs with builtin adveetising struggle to survive). Having misfeatures doesn’t necessarily kill off sufficiently “fit” software (humans have objectively weird/terrible anatomy - sinus construction, that nerve that goes from left to right side of your neck via the heart), etc.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 21.0 ms ] threadLarge projects do evolve - new parts are added over time, old parts are dropped, and individual parts are rewritten, generally in a piecemeal fashion.
The environment selects for some features (say memory protection, which won - OSs either evolved it independently or died out), and select against others (OSs with builtin adveetising struggle to survive). Having misfeatures doesn’t necessarily kill off sufficiently “fit” software (humans have objectively weird/terrible anatomy - sinus construction, that nerve that goes from left to right side of your neck via the heart), etc.
Article should be “artificially evolve” software.
What you're describing is software engineering.