You may joke, but Node.js is still going strong after six years, while Buran never went past test flights. Imagine how much farther Buran could have gotten if they had the ability to share small, focused, reusable modules with the community. Imagine how much more reliable their systems could have been, if they had been able to reason about them at a higher level of abstraction, without getting bogged down into the low-level complexity of left-pad!

I know you are being sarcastic, but remember that there was no community at that time. And besides, open source code would have meant that other countries would have gotten it.

Also, check this out: http://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

Very different from how a typical Node.js left pad module is implemented.

I get your meaning, but additional abstraction layers are equally dangerous because they obsfucate underlying constraints and result in incorrect reasoning about a system.

There's a reason RTOSs don't have very tall software stacks with multiple layers and virtual machines between them and the hardware.

When your garbage collector invoking at the wrong millisecond 0.01% of the time means everyone on the craft is incinerated in the atmosphere... that's a different level of reliability requirement.

You missed the sarcasm.

If you have some stories you can/would like to share, please do!