Question: Have you ever programmed a successful software?

Sarah Mount answered on 15 Mar 2010:

What a great question! I guess it all depends on what you call successful. I haven’t written anything that has been widely used by hundreds of people, but I’ve written a bunch of things that my colleagues and I still use. For example, for an arts festival my colleagues and I made a digital version of a small ecosystem. It looks like a sand pit, and projected onto it is an animation of some creatures. Some are carnivores, who eat the herbivores; herbivores eat plants, but some of those are poisonous. You can change the environment the creatures live in by pouring in water to make it rain, acid to poison the plants, turning a light on to make the sun shine or hitting the sand pit to cause an earthquake! If your School does not block YouTube you can see a short video about it here:

http://www.shift-time.org.uk/events/shift-life.shtml

That project was fun, but most of the research work I do is really about finding new ways to build very complex systems. Sometimes that means building simulators to find out how some systems will work when they are finished, or designing new programming languages or trying things out.