The case for handcrafted software in a mass-produced world
Part 2 A thought experiment: If the computer business responds to commoditization and globalization like other manufacturing industries do, where does that leave programmers – and users?
The software industry is in a mess of its own creation. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: Software is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.
As Adams also put it: To summarize, people are a problem. There are all manner of proffered solutions around communications, leadership, development methodologies, and more, but most of the issues boil down to trying to coordinate large numbers of people and getting them to work together. As a side effect, this has also led the industry to focus on certain types of programming languages and related tools, ones that bring their own problems. But the problem is that we have billions, maybe trillions, of lines of code, and it's too big for anything but large teams of people to handle.
Increasingly, the only practical ways to deal with it involve automation. Developers have been automating compilation and linking for decades. In under 20 years, there's been a massive rise in distributed version control systems, notably Git, and even software distribution methods based around Git-like tools, such as the Red Hat-backed Flatpak.
.jpg)
