@Hollerithevo Re: Duplication
Oh dear. I don't think much of your musical taste. Among symphonists contemporary with Brahms I'd put Dvorak or Tchaikovsky head, shoulders and torso above the sub-Beethoven-wannabe.
That aside, if you look at any music, there's a lot of repetition. Sometimes identical, other times modified. Whole styles and genres are defined by how repetition works. One of the main things that distinguishes music worth listening to from a pop single is that it's not merely repetition, but development of ideas. From antiphonal echo, to the major classical forms like sonata and rondo, to the leitmotif and its many imitators, to name but a few forms spanning the centuries.
Take the familiar repetition away and you have Stockhausen. Or let the repetition overwhelm development for longer than a pop single and you have muzak.
Which is kind-of like github. Clone something, you have duplication. Fork and go your own way, or feed back to your upstream via pull requests, and you have different modes of development. Is not a bugfix branch just what you say of the genome: an essential component of corrections?
I guess an in-depth study of analogies to other complex systems might look more like a PhD thesis than an El Reg post. Maybe a good halfway house could be a paper examining some aspect in depth, which El Reg could then report and commentards could debate in an ingenious self-reference reminiscent of Escher.
Mine's a pint, please. I'll need it to take this any further.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
