ACM queucast

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has a podcast series called "queuecast". It's a fairly quiet feed since many of them are "premium". But I very much enjoyed the recent queuecast featuring Jason Hoffman, CTO of Joyent. In the first segment, he talks about how he "isn't interested in evolution", in response to his developers saying they want to iterate and evolve the product. His reasoning is simple and sound: evolution is about survival, not optimization. Survival means anything that works survives; it doesn't mean that you'll be the best in your class, and it doesn't mean you will use resources most efficiently.