This was very entertaining to read, and we all engage in these these analogies between software development and building houses or bridges or whatever. But nobo

This was very entertaining to read, and we all engage in these these analogies between software development and building houses or bridges or whatever. But nobody talks about this implication: the reason construction is so much more reliable and robust is that our forebears tried lots of different houses and bridges before we settled on the ones we see today. That was only able to happen because nobody was insisting that all houses look alike and use the exact same materials. Since bits are easier to copy than atoms, we've made a fetish out of exact copying ("reuse"), and we peer-pressure each other to copy more with the complaint that they're "fragmenting" if they don't submit. I think it's extremely silly. When something like Android starts feeling it's too fragmented, that's just a symptom of deeper issues, and force-upgrading everyone to the newest version just keeps us from better understanding the deeper issues. Tl;dr - if you want software to be more reliable, insist less on reuse, and allow copies to diverge more.