I wasn’t implying one way or the other and I don’t think that the parent post was either.

The point I was making that when I was writing C day in and day out and mostly just working with a combination of my own code and my companies vote libraries, it was easy to use just a text editor and the command line to build.

But things have gotten more complicated since then. No one could be expected to know the hundreds of functions that make up the entire AWS SDK or all of the options that you need to specify for a typical CloudFormation stack in yml. Of course now it’s even better with the Cloud Developer Kit that lets you generate yml programmatically using a static language - with autocomplete.

Once a code base reaches a million lines of code it gets difficult to keep it all in your head, and even if the software has a nice architecture with module patterns or what not, just the sheer amount of different methods and functions will slow you down. Sure autocomplete will help, but the best productivity solution afaik is to keep the code base small :P

google how linux kernel developers work.

> A kernel developer usually contributes both code and documentation to the Linux kernel. As kernel developers become experts in their particular subsystem, they contribute to patch review on the subsystem mailing list. Eventually, they may become the maintainer of a particular driver.

This sounds good to me. I'm not qualified to judge the quality of the linux kernel, but judging by the adoption, many features, and hardware support, they must do something right.