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This seems like it's more true of software than most other human endeavors; anyone can come along and "git clone" someone else's best work and start right where
by elihu 10y ago
This seems like it's more true of software than most other human endeavors; anyone can come along and "git clone" someone else's best work and start right where they left off without having to re-trace their steps from the beginning. Or, if understanding what they did enough to improve on it is too hard, one can just re-use their work as is and innovate in a completely different direction.
One way this breaks down, though, is that a certain way of doing something becomes "standard". It's really hard for everyone collectively to move forward when we're all using abstractions that are decades old because that's how new software inter-operates with all the old stuff.
- lunaru 10y agoI think your last paragraph just described email. There are so many apps that are built on top of email and it's only very recently that pseudo-standards* of communication (Slack, Facebook Messenger) have sprung up as an alternative upon which you can build your apps with reasonable ubiquity. * The commercial nature of the internet is likely to produce more pseudo-standards than actual standards for us to build on going forward. These are platforms that everyone now takes as baselines. Stripe in payments. Shopify in e-commerce. And so on.