• cecilkorik@lemmy.ca
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    21 hours ago

    I agree that the open source package dependency situation in many popular languages and ecosystems has gotten way out of hand. Well, at least my addiction to reinventing almost every wheel myself and self-hosting my own cobbled together infrastructure which has permanently afflicted me with chronic not-invented-here syndrome aren’t feeling like such a crippling disability anymore. Maybe it’s not always such a bad thing in every situation.

    • vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org
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      12 hours ago

      It’s not a “situation”, it’s normal, it’s common sense that when, say, you plant something to a bigger pot and said something’s roots occupy the space they are given, you are unlikely to successfully move it to a smaller pot.

      Or, say, when you’ve got an addiction, - your brain has neural pathways or something grown accustomed for the stimuli you regularly give it, - and then suddenly withdraw on it, say, 3 blocks of sugar every day, but then a day without sugar at all, you are going to have a bad migraine. Or if you are an alcoholic, you might feel bad enough to start breaking things around you.

      All the mid-XX century science fiction treated imaginary systems like our Internet as something that grows and dies and is never relied upon as the communication system. Similarly with things developed with such as a given. Similarly with anything that can be compared to a system of roots.

      Yes, of course, if you ruin it all every 10 years, like kicking an ant hive, having such complex tall projects might not be an option, but do we really need that, or were Amiga Workbench and Windows 3.11 generally good enough?

      We are a tower of Babel civilization, that can’t try new things because of being terribly afraid of losing all the legacy of one humongous root system. This is an illusion, everything requires maintenance, and keeping that ziggurath from crumbling sucks same or maybe bigger resources to maintain it than rebuilding a completely new one every decade, metaphorically. Except the latter would allow us to feel creators with free minds, and also avoid the problem in the post, and the former is perpetual intellectual humiliation.