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Re:Don't write bugs by Cthulhu_ on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @04:00AM (#28770396)
But we HAVE simplified. I can now type 'fetch this data matching these conditions sorted by this' and be confident about not having any bugs in my code, while underneath there's millions of lines and decades of other people's work and solved bugs being run.

"Back in the day" they would spend weeks devising that system from scratch, hand-writing sorting algorithms, etc.

The mental model of software development is about the problem and domain nowadays, not the low level implementation details. Your job is to solve a business problem, instead of figuring out how to manipulate a CPU and its memory banks to do your bidding.

Re:Don't write bugs by Viliam1234 on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @01:18PM (#28775684)
We have libraries that solve many problems for us.

But those libraries often have parameters, switches, hints, and secret knowledge of the type "do not solve problem X by doing Y because although it seems okay on the surface, the implementational details will increase the complexity from O(N) to O(N^2); use this trick instead".

So we use libraries to solve the problems, but we also need years of experience using those libraries, or we easily create problems we didn't expect. Often there are many alternative libraries for the same task, and the library-specific knowledge becomes obsolete in later version.

Re:Don't write bugs by BigJono on Wednesday October 06, 2021 @12:35PM (#28775109)
That's not simplifying, it's the opposite. We've made it easier by adding more complexity.