I do not really see the point of this article. If you want modular software you need to somehow declare dependencies to existing (maybe open source) software co

I do not really see the point of this article. If you want modular software you need to somehow declare dependencies to existing (maybe open source) software components. If you only want to do this via import statements then you would have to use some long URLs pointing to the exact version. You would have to include some GIT commit hash in case the component is hosted on GIT. That doesn't look like a practical approach to me. If you don't need modularity then as others point out Smalltalk solved this long time ago. Also as others pointed out, gradle, bazel etc solve most of the issues mentioned (incremental builds, distributed (!) caching of build resources).