Software Programs

Broader: computing

Roles: program, input, output, failure-mode, operator

Executable processes that take input, transform it, and produce output. In metaphorical use, programs are frequently personified — they “want” things, “refuse” to cooperate, “die”, and “wake up”. This personification makes programs a natural target domain for embodied and social metaphors.

Applied To This Frame (58)

• intellectual-inquiry → Accidental Complexity
• physics → Action at a Distance
• food-and-cooking → Baklava Code
• embodied-experience → Big Ball of Mud
• tool-use → Boat Anchor
• narrative → Breadcrumb Trail
• organism → Bug
• embodied-experience → C Pointer
• social-behavior → Cargo Cult Programming
• food-and-cooking → Cleaning As You Go
• embodied-experience → Code Smell
• economics → Cron Job
• death-and-dying → Dead Code
• mythology → Deep Magic
• travel → Device Driver
• animal-husbandry → Dogfooding
• folk-taxonomy → Duck Typing
• embodied-experience → Environment Variable
• sanitation → Garbage Collection
• religion → God Object
• tool-use → Golden Hammer
• physics → Heisenbug
• mythology → Hydra Code
• puzzles-and-games → Jenga Code
• carpentry → Jig
• ecology → Keystone Species
• natural-phenomena → Lava Flow
• mythology → Magic Number
• social-behavior → Monkey-Patching
• mythology → Necromancy
• social-roles → Orphan Process
• textiles → Patch
• journeys → Process Fork
• embodied-experience → Process Kill
• social-roles → Process Parent-Child
• embodied-experience → Process Sleep
• embodied-experience → Program Failure Is Bodily Failure
• competition → Race Condition
• communication → Rubber Duck Debugging
• playground → Sandbox
• architecture-and-building → Scaffolding
• architecture-and-building → Schema
• carpentry → Shim
• war → Shotgun Debugging
• mythology → Silver Bullet
• organizational-behavior → Software Peter Principle
• embodied-experience → Software Rot
• food-and-cooking → Spaghetti Code
• ecology → Strangler Fig
• economics → Technical Bankruptcy
• economics → Technical Debt
• mythology → Trojan Horse
• containers → Unix Shell
• communication → Unix Signal
• religion → Voodoo Programming
• animal-husbandry → Yak Shaving
• puzzles-and-games → Yo-Yo Problem
• mythology → Zombie Process