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0 pointscryptica4y ago0 comments

Hardly any compared to software. We're talking about 1 change every 20 years versus 1 to 100s of changes per day. That's a huge magnitude of difference. But that's not even important to my argument.

To suggest that software maintenance and building maintenance are anything alike is ignoring the entire context of the two activities.

With buildings, builders have very little control over the wear and tear caused by the environment. In software, developers collectively have total control over the software and hardware environment which determines whether or not software breaks. Most of the wear and tear in software is a direct result of people compulsively changing stuff in other software (or hardware) up the stack - It's all 100% avoidable. If the software never changed materially (aside from bug fixes), it would not break. Simple as that.

And most of the software changes are simply taking us round in circles. New generations of developers undoing the work of the previous generation, then later reversing direction again, surely we've all seen it happening at most of the software companies we've worked at...

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JetSpiegel4y ago

> Hardly any compared to software. We're talking about 1 change every 20 years versus 1 to 100s of changes per day. That's a huge magnitude of difference.

Linux is more akin to a template of all buildings in the world, which are all the Burj al Arab (of course each building is mostly empty, everyone just uses some part of it). If someone in Mongolia finds a wrongly tiled bathroom in room 221B, Linus changes that tile in its template. A few weeks later, all Burj al Arab in the world are torn down and replace with a new one, only slightly better.

crypticaOP4y ago

This sounds terribly inefficient. Why include the tiles as part of the design? Why not instead have a specification about what kinds of tiles are supported and how they should be laid out instead (just an interface)? Then other projects could take care of providing designs for tiles... Tile providers will need to change to adapt any changes to the core layout, but the core layout doesn't need to change often since the fickle parts are not part of it.

JetSpiegel4y ago

Micro-houses are for the time-rich.

Ain't nobody got the time to select all the sub-specifications for a simple house. It's simpler to live in a small corner of the Burj al-Arab, you can piggyback on some work made by the big hoteliers.

The metaphors are crumbling...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointscryptica4y ago0 comments

Hardly any compared to software. We're talking about 1 change every 20 years versus 1 to 100s of changes per day. That's a huge magnitude of difference. But that's not even important to my argument.

To suggest that software maintenance and building maintenance are anything alike is ignoring the entire context of the two activities.

0 comments

JetSpiegel4y ago

> Hardly any compared to software. We're talking about 1 change every 20 years versus 1 to 100s of changes per day. That's a huge magnitude of difference.

crypticaOP4y ago

JetSpiegel4y ago

Micro-houses are for the time-rich.

The metaphors are crumbling...

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse