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We're not innovating, we're just forgetting slower

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139 points obscurette | 1 comments | 04 Jul 25 14:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.209s | source
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thinkingtoilet ◴[04 Jul 25 15:39 UTC] 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. citrin_ru ◴[04 Jul 25 16:19 UTC] No.44465793[source]▶
A complex software much much easier to break accidentally. While one character can break "hello world" is not something one would do while trying hard not to break it. And potential bugs in a simple application much more likely will be cough during a review. For a complex application no-one have a good mental model to predict what a given change would do reliably. For a simple one it's possible.