I had a fun conversation with my brother the other day. He was working on an R script (given to him by his lab) to perform some data collection. The script was

I had a fun conversation with my brother the other day. He was working on an R script (given to him by his lab) to perform some data collection. The script was no longer usable and he had to rewrite some parts. He was annoyed. Most of the time, software is written until it works just well enough to be just reliable enough to deliver value. And then abandoned. Engineers move on to solving the next problem using that previous bit. We only go back and edit that previous bit once we get to a point that the new thing becomes limited by that previous bit. That is to say, once we encounter a fundamental issue of the old bit. We can't write 'perfect' code today to build on in the future. We have no way of knowing what will be built on top until it's built! At which point we discover the fatal flaws. And then go back and rewrite. Or design a new language/framework/tool etc that avoids those issues. So of course this is the pattern. Separately, engineer's have become end consumers for software. And that software is produced by other engineers, who, are also using software. End consumers may not care about how software is made (though some certainly do, especially once they notice bugs, degraded performance etc caused by technology decisions etc - see 1Password's plan to switch to Electron). But what's the alternative? How could we otherwise avoid this and all the other problems Ryan points out. What is the alternative? Endless rewrites of existing layers with no progress made? Editor configurations, file structure, variable names etc don't affect end users. But they help engineers who help end users. Lots of progress is made to 'simplify' processes. But of course, those simplifications create their own new things that have to be learned, along with their own issues. And those new things are usually built on those old bits. It's easy to download a docker image today and with a single command spin up a React project, running its own databases, and express server and not have to worry about configuring paths, installing dependencies (the right way), configuring ports etc. But now we have to know about Docker. And Docker itself is built on those old bits. If there's a better solution (besides the pedantic write perfect code) I don't see it. But I'm all ears.