It’s time to abandon the cargo cult metaphor

Article note: The history is well researched and presented, the problematic distortions and associations are true... and we need a short, pithy, widely understood phrase for what we colloquially call cargo cult design in the computing word, because the "blindly mimicking behaviors without considering or understanding them, in hopes of obtaining a desired result" meaning _is_ a huge modern cultural problem that needs to be regularly confronted. The only way to change that phrase is to propagate a superior alternative. I regularly use "Dung beetle programming" for the adjacent "avoid writing any of your own code, just glue libraries together until it works" behavior, maybe we can find something in the animal kingdom that isn't a dumb intentional misunderstanding of small mammal behavior (lemmings) for this one.