Comment by jibal
1 day ago
It really can't for numerous reasons, one of them being that PRs have to be fairly low effort, and this will be even more so if the popular "merge daily" PR is voted in. People talk about this "evolving", but it's nothing like biological evolution or genetic algorithms. It's just a linear sequence of small changes, and without either planning and central authority or some stable fitness function (the ecological environment in biological evolution) the changes are directionless.
> some stable fitness function
The participants could always vote to add a test harness and CI/CD to vet pull requests against.
That has nothing to do with a stable fitness function ... an external set of factors that determine which changes allow offspring to survive. This thing doesn't have offspring (or always has exactly one offspring and then the parent dies) and it survives until the whole thing collapses.
And I think they already have what you describe or something like it ... PRs have to build and survive CI.
It should have been abundantly clear that wasn't the way the word "evolution" was being used here to being with. (Actually the comment you replied to used the word "metamorphosis" so what are you even going on about?)
Nonetheless, if you're going to quibble that it isn't ahckchtually evolution because it's missing a fitness function then I'm going to counter that you can form a loose analogy so long as you have some fitness apparatus that's conceptually and operationally separable from the implementation itself. I think some unit tests and a CI pipeline is sufficient.
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