Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

I don’t like the metaphor of the software “stack,” never have. Here is one explanation why.

I wrote some software on a recent Saturday afternoon. I used Google’s Colaboratory, Jupyter Notebooks, Python, String libraries, Regular Expressions, HTML, and a few other things.

I think folks call that a “software stack” these days. The tools build on top of one another where the final result is at the top of the stack, or something like that.

I find the “stack” idea a bad one. I had these tools laid out on the table. I picked up the one I needed at the time and placed it back on the table when I no longer needed it. If the tools were stacked, I would have to unstack the stack, use the tool, return it to the stack, and restack the stack, and…

It is much easier to have all the tools resting on the table. Okay, a “stack” of tools makes a prettier picture all neat and organized and besides, this is just a figure of speech and a metaphor and all that, but an assortment of tools on a table is far more practical.