Thank you very much Paul and everyone for raising that discussion. To borrow from Paul, indeed, algorithms are in fact pieces of software, and I think the result of this rebranding is to invisibilize what a piece of software really is : much more than algorithms, and much more than lines of code. Software is compiling. More generally, its relationship to hardware is not straightforward. It is not obvious that it may run on any machine. It is not obvious that it will work consistently in different computing environments. Software is licensing. Beyond an open or proprietary dichotomy, it is not obvious how and when a piece of software may be used by whom on what terms. Especially as it's now been a long time that coding/programming is not about "writing [put an impressive number here] lines of code", but more about calling libraries that other developed, and licensed. Software is distribution. Algorithms always seem to be developed for internal (and even secret) use but people elaborating a piece of software are most of the time creating a tool that will be used by other people (even within a corporation), and this leads me to the most important point : Software is not only about developers, it is also about users. The use people make of software is not necessarily how it is meant to be used by the developers. Bernhard Rieder in Engines of Order makes the case that every developer is indeed a user of the libraries they are calling. Software is about the complex relationships between developers and users and algorithms tend to erase all this, they're seen as teleogical, and yes, threatening weapons to the point that they're now rhetorically the usual suspects when something goes wrong, the ideal culprits for all the sins of humanity. Don't get me wrong, I do believe that "algorithms" perform very mean tasks like equating gorillas with black people. Algorithms of oppression indeed. There's a very active, very timely and very welcome body of research on these topics, but I do believe that rhetorically calling a piece of software "an algorithm" tends to invibilize (or even anthropomorphize, like for example in the "algorithmic bias" phrasing) a lot of aspects of these pieces of software. -- *********************************************** Alexandre Hocquet Archives Henri Poincaré & RWTH c:o/re https://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/membre-titulaire/alexandre-hocquet https://www.humtec.rwth-aachen.de/cms/HUMTEC/Das-Projekthaus/Kaete-Hamburger... ***********************************************