I wish I could upvote this multiple times.
You go into any experienced woodworker’s shop, you can divide it into maybe 20% of the tools that see the vast majority of the action—table saws, band saws, milling machines, proper hammers. But then there is a halo of 60% or more of the things there are little helpful things—doodads, mallets, jigs, often even shelving and work surfaces—such that she uses a bunch of these on any build she undertakes, and she made them herself. “Why would I stumble around with someone else's mallet when it’s about the same cost and about half a day’s work to machine my own mallet down in a router that has exactly the weight and shape that I like it to have? Pays for itself.”
We are so far from this ideal. All of our software breaks because we imported left-pad and somebody unpublished left-pad. Wasn't even a world changing perfectly V8-on-x64-tuned performant version of left-pad, but we gotta “not reinvent the wheel.”
I don't think we do it for no reason, there is something about software itself right now that is amateurish. We’re still writing subroutines working on data structures; our brains are FORTRAN even if we call it Java, and whatever that is makes it really hard to decouple the tools that we are using to build software from the final outcome that has been built. The woodworker has a sense of the “shape” of the artifact, we routinely build the equivalent of gorgeous wooden tables that start spewing garbage onto their shiny surfaces after three weeks unattended, “oh, I didn’t realize that the built-in trash chutes could get clogged.” Wait—what? “Yeah, we allocate more wood at the bottom of the table to make up for the wood that we remove at the top of the table every night so that the surface is always clean.” Your user doesn't clean the table? “Hahaha you’re silly, users could not possibly have the technical knowledge to keep anything clean, they are not trained in sponges, and I especially could not trust the
with something as beautiful and delicate as this table.” The problem has a beautiful sort of fractal quality to it, every zoom-in is more WTF.
You go into any experienced woodworker’s shop, you can divide it into maybe 20% of the tools that see the vast majority of the action—table saws, band saws, milling machines, proper hammers. But then there is a halo of 60% or more of the things there are little helpful things—doodads, mallets, jigs, often even shelving and work surfaces—such that she uses a bunch of these on any build she undertakes, and she made them herself. “Why would I stumble around with someone else's mallet when it’s about the same cost and about half a day’s work to machine my own mallet down in a router that has exactly the weight and shape that I like it to have? Pays for itself.”
We are so far from this ideal. All of our software breaks because we imported left-pad and somebody unpublished left-pad. Wasn't even a world changing perfectly V8-on-x64-tuned performant version of left-pad, but we gotta “not reinvent the wheel.”
I don't think we do it for no reason, there is something about software itself right now that is amateurish. We’re still writing subroutines working on data structures; our brains are FORTRAN even if we call it Java, and whatever that is makes it really hard to decouple the tools that we are using to build software from the final outcome that has been built. The woodworker has a sense of the “shape” of the artifact, we routinely build the equivalent of gorgeous wooden tables that start spewing garbage onto their shiny surfaces after three weeks unattended, “oh, I didn’t realize that the built-in trash chutes could get clogged.” Wait—what? “Yeah, we allocate more wood at the bottom of the table to make up for the wood that we remove at the top of the table every night so that the surface is always clean.” Your user doesn't clean the table? “Hahaha you’re silly, users could not possibly have the technical knowledge to keep anything clean, they are not trained in sponges, and I especially could not trust the with something as beautiful and delicate as this table.” The problem has a beautiful sort of fractal quality to it, every zoom-in is more WTF.