Software and Other Shenanigans

We don’t talk about uncategorized software all that often. We almost always include an adjective to indicate something about the code we’re discussing, usually as a means of describing the problem domain. As a few quick examples, there’s e-commerce software, marketing software, educational software, or inventory management software. That clarification is handy, since it provides context about the code being discussed. The problem (and I would not be at all surprised if Java people – and I largely write Java at my job – did this), is when we over-generalize how we categorize software in a way that adds no value. For example, “administrative software” or “enterprise software.”