Situated Software

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2024-09-23 12:00:04

There’s a concept I’ve been using recently that I find quite helpful as a descriptive tool, which is the notion of software being situated.

Software which is situated is software which is highly specific to some particular context – e.g. a single person, a single task or category of task, a single computer. It is non-reusable outside of that context, and as a result it is able to make very in depth (and usually implicit) assumptions about reality.

This isn’t a binary. All software has a context, so no software is truly unsituated, but that context can be more or less specific. The question is not whether software is situated, but where and how strongly it is situated.

Hypothesis is not especially situated software (libraries tend not to be), but Hypothesis’s build system is very situated despite being designed to run on a variety of different computers and CI systems – it is adapted to a very specific task (running Hypothesis build tasks).

Another situated codebase I work on is the code that powers my notebook. This code is what Simon Tatham calls SymbiosisWare. Code that is part of the extended self rather than a distinct project in its own right (although jml has recently adapted the code for his own use. It’s important to remember that even situated software can be reused, it just requires adaptation to the new environment). In this case the context to which it is situated is that of a single person.