It’s not that pie can’t be duplicated, it’s that there are real costs to the duplication. And making pies precisely the same is surprisingly hard (pie is my favorite treat and I make them all the time).
Not so with software. Duplication and distribution are essentially free. Copies are perfect replicas. Why not then insist on the best version? Also, with food, the varied experience of slightly different pies is fun (“variety is the spice of life”). Unless I expected variation in my software, I would be extremely annoyed that it did not do what I wanted.
Maybe I'm wrong—probably am—but isn't the article talking about something else? He's not talking about making a copy of a piece of software as a perfect replica. I think he's talking about coding something that is not conceptually different from something that was already existing.
> I’m genuinely confused by your comment. Pies can be duplicated. You just grab the same ingredients and follow the same recipe.
That’s just a different pie made with the same ingredients and recipe, it’s not the same pie I ate yesterday, it’s not a duplicate. I can never have that pie I ate yesterday again.
I can, however, make as many perfect duplicates of software as I want.
> I can, however, make as many perfect duplicates of software as I want.
Absolutely true but the point of the article is not about duplicating software. Is about developing something someone else already developed in a similar way even though the act of doing that doesn't produce something that's "original".
I'm not, I get what they're saying. If I want to eat pie, I need to bake one first or find someone to bake it every time. If I want to use a software, I only need to write or find the software once; then I can keep using it indefinitely. Therefore, the common assumption is perfectly justified. Most people who write software do so to create something that isn't already available.
That said, I still agree with the post. Justified or not, the assumption is frequently wrong. Coding is fun for its own sake.
> Most people who write software do so to create something that isn't already available.
Well I guess we must work in a different environment because over my 13 years as a web dev I've seen people trying to reinvent the weel and coding the same thing over and over again. Just think at all infinite JS frameworks.
Are they technically identical? No. Was the problem "solved" already? Probably yes. Was it not solved the exact way the developer wanted? Also probably yes which is why they decided to code something new.
They don't consider it technically identical. The design goal was to make something that's significantly better in some way or another. Which is very unlike pie baking.
(I'm sure there's a few frameworks made just for fun/practice but by the time you see it published I'd round that down below 10%)
Same thing happens with software. You grab the same libraries and languages and build the same thing.
I think I get what you’re trying to say when it comes to software but sometimes one might switch even if the new software doesn’t offer new solutions.