Software code should not be able to be patented. A copyright is more appropriate. There is little difference between me writing a book and writing code.

If I write code to display "Hello World" on a screen, someone else can use the same tool, generate the same basic templates (Visual C++ for example builds a lot of boiler plate for you) and then type in their code to do the same thing. Odds are there will be very little difference. What I did was not anything that deserves a patent. If the second developer looked at my source code and used copy/paste, we could say they violated a copyright.

Obviously there is the question of scale, but a large program is simply a collection of objects and functions, each of which is a small piece of code. Most of the time, that code was "copied" from someone else, whether a KB that showed how to do something or a web page. I recognize there are those people who come first, and that figure out how to do something new, but they use the underlying OS calls to do so. How is that something that deserves a patent? I don't believe it does.

Patents were intended to protect the efforts required to imagine and develop new things. We now have patents for the human genome, which is absolutely ridiculous. I have a friend whose child was denied medical treatment because a company patented the gene that caused the issue he suffered from - and would not allow anyone else to develop a solution to the issue. The abuse is rampant.