Software is gradually turning into a similar pattern of layering like sediment. With most modern "hardware level" applications, there are still layers of OS magic happening under the hood.
We're now into maybe decade 4-ish of software dependency.
There was a scene in one of Alastair Reynold's books where a character basically was a computational archaeologist. That resonates with me a lot.
In a couple centuries, it's not a terrible prediction of the future that software stacks will accumulate cruft over time and debugging certain issues will require immense financial effort to both dig through the layers of software commits and historical proposed merge commits, plus adding extra tests on top of bedrock code and its fixes.
No idea what this will look like. I imagine easily executed functions will pop up in mixed pip's and npm's that are easily recreated functionality every decade, regardless of prior art. Every new programmer wants to make a stamp on the world.
There's some saying about history repeating itself, but I'm dumb and don't remember.
We're now into maybe decade 4-ish of software dependency.
There was a scene in one of Alastair Reynold's books where a character basically was a computational archaeologist. That resonates with me a lot.
In a couple centuries, it's not a terrible prediction of the future that software stacks will accumulate cruft over time and debugging certain issues will require immense financial effort to both dig through the layers of software commits and historical proposed merge commits, plus adding extra tests on top of bedrock code and its fixes.
No idea what this will look like. I imagine easily executed functions will pop up in mixed pip's and npm's that are easily recreated functionality every decade, regardless of prior art. Every new programmer wants to make a stamp on the world.
There's some saying about history repeating itself, but I'm dumb and don't remember.