Growing organism - based on a real life story

While I was sitting in McDonald’s today, eating some junk-burger, I looked across my table and noticed a beautiful girl. Man, she was something else. A true beauty. I looked at her walking to another table, 20 fit from my table and sitting down. In front of her was a woman. Try to guess on your own, how does the woman look like:

a. A true super-hot-mama, even more beautiful than her daughter(?).
b. Good looking woman.
c. An OK woman.
d. My GOD! What a monster ?!

I’ll let you ponder for a few seconds…

Now that I’m sure you’ve got the right answer, have you ever thought about these questions:

In 15 years, will this beautiful girl will look like her mother(?) ?
Is there any chance that god is just messing with my head and she’ll be a fine woman even if her mother(?) is a….
What about statistics? Anyone knows what are the odds for a beautiful girl to become a beautiful woman ?

And of course, a sick question to recap this self-debate:

What does her father think about this situation ?

For some strange reason, I started to think about applications. I know, I’m sick, no doubt, but bare with me: How many small beautiful applications you developed, become a monstrous Enterprise Applications that are eating their programmers for breakfast ? Go back to my questions and replace the word “girl” with “small application” and the word “mother” with “Enterprise Application”. I think that this symptom of “growing organism” exists in developing real applications and we encounter it every day when we maintain legacy code or patching-up a system that shouldn’t survive the prototype phase.

I guess that just like in life, with good monitoring of our state and good activities, this transformation, this growing, could still be graceful.

I just wonder what are the odds…