We see the same thing with containers. Docker, flatpak, snap... It's just the right time for it.

Languages have evolve to change the way we handle constraints like memory, speed, readability, expressivity etc.

We are arriving at the pick of what languages can bring on the table. Sure we can improve things here and there, but the huge challenges now are integration, packaging, distribution, updates, communications, multi-tiers architectures and all that.

So we now tweak platforms to help us with that.

But because we didn't see that coming, it's not done in any structured way. It's done exactly the way we did everything since the beginning of computing, by stitching together stuff then hitting hard on it with a hammer until the job is done.

This is not new. IT is a joke of an engineering field. We hack everything, don't think about the future, and then end up using the status quote. It's always has been like that.

I agree. Containers should be unnecessary -- all that they could provide could be done at the process level with an operating system designed to isolate computing resources appropriately. But operating systems were not historically designed for that so another (somewhat ridiculous) layer is added on top.

actually all containers do is utilise the very design in an OS like LXC in Linux to form containers. Containers are not a platform on top of Linux, they are a wrapper around different isolation tools build into the kernel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LXC

Thats all containers are?

They are an abstraction over OS level isolation.

IT is a joke of engineering for non engineers. If a pull request doesn't follow some principles agreed a priori it doesn't get merged. If there are people that like to play the "IT cowboys" just hacking together stuff without any whatsoever process or unit test that certifies the behaviour of what they have written, jeopardising the entire team efforts, it is not a failure of software engineering, it's a failure of that specific team. And please bear in mind that I worked in such toxic environments, but I never thought for a moment that software engineering and software architecture are jokes. The joke was the team/organisation on which I was at the time.

Alan Kay might have something to say about all this.