[vineyardmike]

> I think one of the biggest issues we currently suffer in the programming field is the use of libraries upon libraries, layers upon layers, without understanding.

I think there’s a balance here. We obviously are way better off with all the layers we’ve built, whether it’s compiler optimizations or kernels or VMs or runtimes or.. or..

We have some widely accepted abstractions and layers like “android” or “Linux” where we don’t question the underlying code too much and we just accept and appreciate it. They’re also heavily maintained for us. 20 layers of left pad? Not so much.

It’s almost the standardization problem. We need bigger and more feature-rich runtimes and standard libraries as we tackle more complex and bigger problems. But if every dev has to chart their own path through 1000000 combinations of libraries and runtimes and components, we can’t -as a society- maintain them and battle test them with the same rigor. Like containers, we’ve started to build established norms and tools (docker, oci, etc) freeing us from all the details, when the abilities were always there within Linux.