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139 points obscurette | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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thinkingtoilet ◴[] No.44465473[source]
> Software has followed the same trajectory, piling abstraction upon abstraction until we’ve created a tower of dependencies so precarious that updating a single package can break an entire application.

This is like saying old software is so simple that updating a line of code can break an entire application. It's a silly thing to say. No matter how complex or how simple a piece of software is, you can easily break it. If you have a program that prints out "hello world", guess what? Updating a single character can break the entire application!

The world is more complex now. We've stood on the shoulders of giants who stood on the shoulders of giants. A few centuries ago a renaissance man could make advances in multiple fields. Now people are specialized. It's the same thing with software. Of course, people take it to an extreme. However, you go ahead and write your own crypto library, I'll use a vetted one created by experts.

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1. alganet ◴[] No.44465615[source]
If I break some source code by messing with it, I know what happened. I might even learn from it.

Now if npm breaks it, or Claude breaks it, a developer might not even know what was broken.

He's talking about that kind of thing, not the resilience of code to take random character deletions.

IT is very much non-specialized compared to older disciplines. It's so young. Every single one of us is still a jack of all trades in some degree.

You're relying on the "don't roll your own crypto" popular quote to drop the mic. That's misguided. This advice comes from an argument of strength by numbers, not anything related to abstractions. It tells me you don't understand it.

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