3 ms·
If rewiring houses cost millions or billions of dollars, we still wouldn't have circuit breakers. The problem is that we have what probably amounts to tens of
by api 3y ago
If rewiring houses cost millions or billions of dollars, we still wouldn't have circuit breakers.
The problem is that we have what probably amounts to tens of trillions of dollars of sunk cost in software systems built on 1970s paradigm OSes, and updating all that software for a different paradigm isn't feasible.
We also have probably tens of billions of dollars worth of sunk cost in developer education teaching developers to write software for current systems.
I hate to be such a cynical bastard, but one thing I have learned after 20+ years in this profession is that it will not be fixed. The OS paradigms of the 70s are etched in solid stone. We will put it in a box (VM) inside a box inside a box inside a box inside a box instead.
I don't like it either. You're hearing frustration. But I think it's true. Once a system is widely deployed and a lot of other things are built on it, it is eternal.
I do hold out a small amount of hope that a few more generations of coding AI development might yield AIs good enough to rewrite software. Give it a code base and tell it to rewrite it in language X running on OS API Y without sacrificing any functionality.
That might be a way out since the trap comes from the fact that software written manually by humans is expensive. Geometrically reducing the cost of that kind of refactoring could change the economics.
- mikewarot 3y agoMea culpa I read the first part of your comment, and was too quick to reply. I share your frustrations. For Windows GUI applications, there really shouldn't be much work replacing file selection dialogs with calls to a powerbox that returns a capability. I'm not sure how hard it is to do the same thing in Linux GUI land. It's the command line programs that are the most grief. Since we don't have any notion of standard parameters for filenames, paths, etc... it'll be most of the work reworking those away from files and ambient authority.
- api 3y agoThe thing that makes me cynical about any notion of fixing the foundation is just how much software there is. The long tail is long. It’s actually hard for a person to wrap their heads around the true size of all these ecosystems that ride on top of every OS and platform. All that software assumes a rather hacky coarse grained 70s security model and it assumes that all those syscalls and libraries work. The best analogy I can think of isn’t repairing the foundation of a house, or even moving a house to a new foundation. It’s more like repairing the structural elements of an aircraft in flight, except there isn’t even a concept of landing. The plane is in the air for eternity and is constantly mid air refueled. It’s like that. Everything must work, everything is always behind schedule, nothing can ever stop.