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The problem though is the vastly different scale. Even small software components have thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code. Millions of lines of code
by tsimionescu 3y ago
The problem though is the vastly different scale. Even small software components have thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code. Millions of lines of code is not uncommon for many commonly used tools.
Imagine a mechanical thing with a million interconnection gears. Would anyone really expect to understand it and be able to replace gears to make it fit their work flow better?
Even for developers of that software, it is often inscrutable, and it is often hard to estimate how a change in one feature might impact other features.
- idle_zealot 3y agoAnd that's an important aspect that engineers need to take into account: serviceability. We already kinda do this for our own sake, we do need to onboard developers and change functionality over time after all. But there's an art to designing a complex system that is nonetheless scrutible and modifiable. There have been experiments in designing such decoupled and live-modifiable systems, like smalltalk images and lisp machines, but the closest thing we have to that in broad use is the web browser, with its inspection window and console. Of course, webpages are usually deployed as compiled blobs of script these days, but without an isane amount of effort one could build a webapp that was well-suited to modification. Then the user agent would just need some way to save user modifications and apply them consistently. Basically like low-friction userscripts or extensions.