> It's not that it's hard, what it is is brittle. A vertically-integrated stack, by its very nature, cannot survive forces that jostle it in the horizontal direction.
Is this not exactly the whole problem, though? Fault tolerance.
My chisel doesn't need to integrate with my hand plane which doesn't need to integrate with my band saw. One of them breaking doesn't break the others.
This is why experienced developers gravitate toward powerful tools that they trust deeply but that have extremely hard boundaries. It's why we're still stuck with ASCII text as the primary artifact for coding, for example. The moment we try to move off of that a single fault can bring down the whole house of cards.
It is but 90% of this horizontal pressure is just nonsense. Not actual faults that need to be tolerated. Cooler heads stick around and solve the problems, but by the time that happens, the larger dev community has already moved on to something thoroughly crappier.
ASCII is perhaps a poor example, all modern tooling is UTF-8 capable.
Is this not exactly the whole problem, though? Fault tolerance.
My chisel doesn't need to integrate with my hand plane which doesn't need to integrate with my band saw. One of them breaking doesn't break the others.
This is why experienced developers gravitate toward powerful tools that they trust deeply but that have extremely hard boundaries. It's why we're still stuck with ASCII text as the primary artifact for coding, for example. The moment we try to move off of that a single fault can bring down the whole house of cards.