> What is so hot about a single piece of software?
I think a big part of it is: it works!
> There must be thousands, scores of thousands, of programmers
> who could whip up the equivalent. It's not the holy fucking
> grail, for heaven's sake.
I know that the popular conception is of thousands of programmers whipping up millions of lines of code that does useful things. But the reality is far closer to this:
http://news.google.com/news?q=fbi+software