[ExI] Tim May and DNA

[BillK]

On Sun, 27 Jan 2019 at 15:36, spike wrote:
> Even the notion of spaghetti code analogy vastly understates the complexity
> of how DNA creates a cell.  Spaghetti code jumps all over the place and is
> crazy-hard to debug, but that is mostly cosmetic.  The code behaves
> consistently.  There are so many chance events in embryo development, it is
> astonishing that identical twins look alike.  They are born with different
> fingerprints but similar features.  This is analogous to two bell curves
> created by the same test using a different set of students.  If you get or even from
> enough students, the curves look similar, but the details of how it formed
> differ.
>
> If you look back as recently as 15 years ago at what was commonly written
> about all the stuff we could learn if we could read our DNA, it is
> laughable: we thought that whole system was far simpler than it turned out
> to be.  We are still finding new complications.
>

Keith said that the suggestion from Tim May was made 'way back' in
time. That probably means before structured programming became the
more normal coding practice. At that time excessive use of the GOTO
statement was more common and created spaghetti code that was
difficult to follow.  Some languages even allowed the original GOTO
destination to be changed from elsewhere in the program, depending on
data encountered by the program, or even data returned from calls to
sub-routines outside the main program. The main program would not behave
consistently unless all the data and states in all the surrounding
programs was exactly the same. This would be more like DNA being
modified by the environment, or the environment deciding which genes
get expressed in particular cases.
Tim May might have been thinking of more than mere spaghetti code.



BillK