TLDR of the article: cross-application interfaces (like GDB's cli interface has effectively become) break with version changes. Users don't care about the reaso

TLDR of the article: cross-application interfaces (like GDB's cli interface has effectively become) break with version changes. Users don't care about the reasons behind that breakage, and would like to see those treated as bugs. Developers see that attitude as unworkable, and would rather just not care about external interfaces at all. I always wonder why we gave up on refactoring instead of switching it along so that cross-program changes would become not just possible, but easy and feasible. What can be done using alt-shift-r in a distributed large scale java app with a GWT frontend and 50 libraries used on the backend, each of which can run distributed across machines ... is baffling. It shouldn't be ! And now with microservices, it becomes more and more baffling that this worked at one point. That's just horrible. Most of the complaints about it strike me as being complaints that when a toolchain allows for complexity, people make things complex. And of course, that's fair. If you give a 5 year old a laser CNC machine and he finds how to turn it on, things are going to go south quickly. But damn the things you can do with that !