Conscientious software

  • Authors:
  • Richard P. Gabriel;Ron Goldman

  • Affiliations:
  • Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Menlo Park, California;Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Menlo Park, California

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Software needs to grow up and become responsible for itself and its own future by participating in its own installation and customization, maintaining its own health, and adapting itself to new circumstances, new users, and new uses. To create such software will require us to change some of our underlying assumptions about how we write programs. A promising approach seems to be to separate software that does the work (allopoietic)from software that keeps the system alive (autopoietic).