On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 9:48 PM, Marcus D. Leech<address@hidden> wrote:
I think this speaks to the *monumental* complexity of modern software.
The surprising thing is not how well it generally works, but that
it works at all.
I think that people who aren't software developers (heck, technology
developers in general) have no grasp of the horrendous complexity we
juggle in our heads every day, and generally "just make it work".
--
Marcus Leech
Principal Investigator
Shirleys Bay Radio Astronomy Consortiumhttp://www.sbrac.org
That's a good point, Marcus. It also brings me back to why we have so many
dependencies in the project, which I've often heard people complain about.
But the thousands of lines of code that those dependencies have means that
we don't have to re-write them and can then build more complex systems
because of it. The whole "standing on the shoulders of giants" concept. But
it definitely adds to the complexity and the potential problems with
stability and compatibility that we need to work on. Though the effort of
dealing with the latter problems no where near outweighs the former
benefits.