logoalt Hacker News

teifereryesterday at 7:24 AM0 repliesview on HN

Imagine tomorrow all source code for all software disappears.

Would we still be able to use computers? Of course! They don't need the source code to run.

Would we nevertheless be in big trouble? Oh definitely. We'd need to write all software again, from scratch. Some critical parts we could reverse engineer. Maybe even derive some structures that translate back into source code, but only because a human wrote that source code in the first place.

Hopefully the point is clear: A proof, even if it is correct, that is totally obscure and unintelligable by humans is not very useful for mathematics. It's a black box that doesn't further understanding of the structures and approaches to think about them, and that's what math is all about.Just having a big binary blob of a program doesn't help much if you want to add a feature.

That's also why biology is so hard. There is no source code. It's just millions and millions of years of evolution and things have evolved in weird ways that don't really make it easy to understand them, even though they clearly work.