I enjoyed the biological viewpoint on the life cycle of a software project! But it raises the question of exactly what it means for software to "reproduce". Since versions like "alpha" and "beta" apply to software projects rather than individual bits of code, I guess that "reproduction" here isn't about code-generating code or AI programming or anything like that. Instead we might say that a fork of a software project is asexual reproduction by fission, while maybe when a new project is inspired by features from existing ones that is a sort of sexual reproduction (with a variable number of "parents"). Is that what you had in mind?
On the other hand, if an "adult" software project means one that isn't changing any more, then that makes me think of how Donald Knuth decided that the version number of the TeX typesetting software is converging towards pi, with no new features added and every bug-fix release adding another decimal digit (currently at 3.141592653), and at his death the version number will become pi and all remaining bugs will become permanent "features". So perhaps after Knuth's death we will get a glimps of the elusive "adult software"?
I enjoyed the biological viewpoint on the life cycle of a software project! But it raises the question of exactly what it means for software to "reproduce". Since versions like "alpha" and "beta" apply to software projects rather than individual bits of code, I guess that "reproduction" here isn't about code-generating code or AI programming or anything like that. Instead we might say that a fork of a software project is asexual reproduction by fission, while maybe when a new project is inspired by features from existing ones that is a sort of sexual reproduction (with a variable number of "parents"). Is that what you had in mind?
On the other hand, if an "adult" software project means one that isn't changing any more, then that makes me think of how Donald Knuth decided that the version number of the TeX typesetting software is converging towards pi, with no new features added and every bug-fix release adding another decimal digit (currently at 3.141592653), and at his death the version number will become pi and all remaining bugs will become permanent "features". So perhaps after Knuth's death we will get a glimps of the elusive "adult software"?