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Originally Posted by punkworld
2. The analogy between software and science is a very bad one.
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To the contrary
The program is the universe not the program used by God to create the universe. Discussing the program used by God to create the universe takes you one level higher. There could be a program or some logic used by God to create all this, but we all ready have trouble to understand what we see and will not venture into a discussion of the Divine intelligence.
Scientists don't really care about the programming language used by God. Exactly, that most of you don't care about the programming language used to write vBulletin software or any other program. The program for any end-user is defined by its look and feel. The look is the static interface and the feel refers to the behavior of the software when you click some buttons, submit new data...
Scientists seem to use a similar approach for the universe. This type of external analysis is called black box analysis or functional analysis in software engineering and that's what scientists are doing with the universe.
Some SCIENTISTS, like biologists, will just try to find out the relationship between the inputs and outputs of SOFTWARE. Then, they will just put all this in a big table/database. An input/output table is still a program, but a very long one. Physicists attempt writing more concise programs that capture the SOFTWARE's features using mathematics as a "programming language". So you see, the analogy can be pushed a bit further.