there's an interesting aspect to recursive decomposition there; an 'essential problem' at one level of abstraction may merely be an accident introduced one level higher up
like, lots of programs are specified to do one or another thing with the filesystem, and have to include extra complexity to do it, but the filesystem is something we introduced and could do without; it doesn't exist in objective reality outside the computer. is that complexity accidental or essential? at the level of the program it's essential (especially if the program is something like find(1) or cp(1), whose job can't be defined at all without presupposing a filesystem) but at the level of the system it's accidental
Division of labor: making accidental complexity essential since 1945.
Then again, perhaps we need to account for opportunity cost. Even if persistent storage can take many forms, it's hard to imagine that equivalent features could be 10x simpler. Maybe Chuck Moore would disagree, but his modus is usually to insist you don't need something.. (also totally fair)
there's an interesting aspect to recursive decomposition there; an 'essential problem' at one level of abstraction may merely be an accident introduced one level higher up
like, lots of programs are specified to do one or another thing with the filesystem, and have to include extra complexity to do it, but the filesystem is something we introduced and could do without; it doesn't exist in objective reality outside the computer. is that complexity accidental or essential? at the level of the program it's essential (especially if the program is something like find(1) or cp(1), whose job can't be defined at all without presupposing a filesystem) but at the level of the system it's accidental
100%
Division of labor: making accidental complexity essential since 1945.
Then again, perhaps we need to account for opportunity cost. Even if persistent storage can take many forms, it's hard to imagine that equivalent features could be 10x simpler. Maybe Chuck Moore would disagree, but his modus is usually to insist you don't need something.. (also totally fair)