Will Wright: Software Will Write Itself

Found this quote from Will Wright -- game designer extraordinaire and creator of SPORE, The Sims and Sim City -- about Software:

Most of the software that we’ve used thus far has been designed software—procedurally designed software. We’re just getting to the point where we’re getting a lot of automatically generated software—you know, CASE tools or adaptive programming, where I’m pretty convinced that in a few years a lot of the software is going to be evolved, as opposed to written by humans. So over time, we’re going to be able to understand the way the software works less and less. It’s going to become a soft biological system. But at the same time, it’ll be very robust, very fault-tolerant compared to the very brittle software we have today. Once we lose control of software design, once software can design itself, write itself, improve itself, I think we’re going to have a different relationship to it. You can take a very complex piece of software, like an airline reservation system, and there’s no one person who understands the way the whole thing works.

Maybe soon we'll be able to breed software the way we do apples, roses, or cattle.

via Dr Dobbs