You're basically describing the very nature of distributed systems :) We see many more of them nowadays because of the scale of some modern web apps / sites whe

You're basically describing the very nature of distributed systems :) We see many more of them nowadays because of the scale of some modern web apps / sites whereas in the 1990s the internet just wasn't that big or that complicated. Whether every app that ends up being that complicated actually needs to be like that is a different question. It also comes back to "don't reinvent the wheel" and "not invented here syndrome". You _could_ implement many of these things in your homogenous codebase or you could just reuse something that already works. I'm just saying there are serious and good counterarguments to the "large amount of quite homogenous source code written in a single language" approach. I agree with some of the details (like AMIs, EC2, different types and versions of linux, different package managers in the same system), but I think in general the things you think of as hacks aren't hacks at all and just the signs of progress. Or at least the nature of large, complex modern distributed systems. You basically described the term "agile development" and you're remembering a time many developers would rather forget with rather rose-tinted glasses. (I don't really know enough about objective-c to comment.)