.NET vs. the human genome 19 Mar 2008

Slashdot users compare the .NET framework to the human genome:

"The comparison to the human genome is interesting. The genome contains about 3 billion base pairs and 30,000 coding genes. As best I can see, .NET is quite a bit bigger: The closest thing to a gene is a method (an object that can be used, or not used, and which does something). The genome has 30,000 and .NET has 384,000. So even if it takes 10 methods to do what one gene does, they are equivalent.

"It takes 3 base pairs to code for a single protein, perhaps the closest we can come to an instruction. Each gene has an average of 3,000 base pairs, equivalent to 1,000 instructions. So we are looking at 30,000 genes x 1,000 instructions/gene or about 30,000,000 instructions in the genome. .NET has 8,000,000 instructions. Given the roughness of the comparison, this is pretty close."

Scary stuff. We're now creating programs that are roughly equal in complexity to the human genome...yet they still aren't anywhere near as efficient, effective or beautiful.