>There's more to it than pruning, grafting, weeding. You need good soil, water, light. You need the right tools. You have to understand how to plant. There's fertilizers, insecticides, etc. And like plants, software tends to be organic.

I appreciate the extension of the analogy - however, a car engine is a highly tuned machine composed of fixed parts - somewhat quickly assembled - somewhat less easily disassembled for repairs. Should software not be less organic and more assembly? :)

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>>I like the term gardening. There is science involved too or at least there should be more. Mostly I see a rampant collection of weeds - code spewed in every direction and it grows. It is not well directed. Little examples - a stored procedure of the same name as a prg in an exe and the two pieces of code do a similar task but totally differently. I don't have a lot of use for VFP stored procedures, since they are fired by the local pc and not the remote server.
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>>If anything, a gardener would prune and tie and graft to the goal of making something healthy and beautiful. Some are just letting the garden go to - is the word seed?