[Themaintainers] [EXTERNAL] Re: XKCD comic on maintenance

[Edward Summers]

> On Aug 18, 2020, at 9:59 PM, Sims, Benjamin Hayden <bsims at lanl.gov> wrote:
> Related to Andy’s point, not a lot of modern infrastructures have embraced layers of abstraction as enthusiastically as computing has. The idea behind layers of abstraction is to hide complexity behind simpler interfaces, which makes it possible to think of software as a “stack” of components (and consequently as a Jenga-like construct as depicted in the cartoon). So part of me wants to say that weird dependencies might be better hidden, and hence more surprising, in software. But on the other hand there are plenty of examples of hidden dependencies in old-school infrastructure. I’m not sure they follow the same stack-like structure though, so the cartoon might look a little different. I’m curious if any of the software developers/maintainers on the list have some perspective on this. 

Actually, in some ways I think dependencies are *more* legible in software than they usually are in "old-school" infrastructures. From makefiles to pom.xml to package.json, software builds need to explicitly list these dependencies, and the dependencies tend to be actionable. I feel like these lists are largely understudied from an infrastructure perspective--but I'd love to be corrected if people know of some research.

Also, i'd be interested to hear if people have found there to be "real world" or non-computational equivalents to these dependency lists for the research, for example accounting ledgers, supply chain data, etc?

//Ed