Over the festive period, one of my friends posted this to his twitter feed. I found it interesting for several reasons, not least because I’ve been wondering about things like minimum viable products, lack of direction, code bloat and how computer science and programming seems to be full of decisions to be made lately.
I am not a Unix systems expert per se – I run my own Linux desktops from time to time – but I can identify what some of the comments in this regarding quality, dependencies which aren’t really dependencies from a functional point of view. I wonder sometimes if we need to take a step back and just….clean up programming.
If that resistance/ignorance of code reuse had resulted in self-contained and independent packages of software, the price of the code duplication might actually have been a good tradeoff for ease of package management. But that was not the case: the packages form a tangled web of haphazard dependencies that results in much code duplication and waste.
I’m not necessarily talking about refactoring (although that does help sometimes) but our outlook on how we get things done.
It is part of wider thoughts I have about technology.