Copyright 2010 Les Hatton
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Upplysning 2010-11-16
Titel: The Characteristic Shape of Software
Upplysare: Les Hatton, Kingston University, London
Filnamn: podcast_upplysning_2010.11.16_x264.mp4
Info:
In the last 50 years, many different ways of implementing software systems have evolved.
These include well over 150 programming languages as well as numerous paradigms such as
structured decomposition, OO and component based systems, all the way through to today's mash-up,
where you metaphorically throw software at a wall to see what sticks, a bit like spaghetti...

It is therefore a matter of considerable surprise that, independently of all these paradigms and languages,
software has a characteristic signature in common with many natural systems; that of power-law distributions.
This is highly analogous to the behaviour of a gas which contains many, many molecules in random motion
but which together obey the general gas equation PV = RT, independently of the gas.

In this talk, Les Hatton will argue that this behaviour is inevitable and will prove a new general
theorem that it is intimately related to the conservation of choice in Shannon's Information Theory.
This leads naturally to power-law behaviour in component size independently of the technology used
and in turn leads to the well-observed phenomenon of software defect clustering.
This will be supported by lots of empirical data.

Kodningsinfo:
Mpg4-format med h.264 video och AAC-ljud.
Kodat med x264 och nero AAC encoder.
Video: 350kbit/s 432x240 25fps.
Ljud: 32kbit/s 22kHz mono.