Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with hackish solution is that they get put in places they don’t belong. In other professions, there’s regulation in place to prevent these kind of shortcuts. Also, if you have ever worked with anyone trying to get specifications worked out, you’ll see that most people (including devs) rely on intuition rather than checklists and will always forget to tell you something that is critical. The thing is that…
> The problem with hackish solution is that they get put in places they don’t belong. In other professions, there’s regulation in place to prevent these kind of shortcuts. That's an illusion. The reality is, it's all hacky solutions on top of hacky solutions. Even in manufacturing: the spec may be fixed, and the factory line produces identical products by the million - but the spec was developed through an ad-hoc pro…
A bit of tangent: I think the idea of coddling users is what’s leading to the complexity of all those system. We’re building cathedrals when we need tents. Instead of having small, sharp software tools that can be adjusted easily, we’re developing behemoths that’s supposed to handle everything under the sun (systemd, a lot of modern package managers, languages that is tied to that one IDE,…)