People who think Torvalds won the Tanenbaum/Torvalds debate & therefore monolithic kernels are “better” forget that Torvalds’ entire argument was “Linux is a toy project that should never ever be used for anything important”, or they remember but don’t care.

Worse-is-better is one of the most damaging infohazards in tech.

One of the problems with worse-is-better rhetoric is that it sucks labor away from everything else to deal with mountains of technical debt. Every stack decision is a decision under duress between a shit sandwich and a vomit omlet.

You can’t build something worth using because everything needs to ship yesterday, and you’re behind on even that because time pressure forces you to pick a third party dep developed by people who also know it’s not worth using.

Nearly every third party dependency will eventually become more expensive to support than something built in-house to support your actual needs, but those costs don’t show up at the demo stage and by the time they show up you may have already failed upward.

This extends even down to the education level. In industry, we aren’t using tech that’s genuinely newer than the late 70s. We are using new implementations of 70s tech, generally. Very occasionally we use 80s tech that should & could have been invented in the 60s (like UUIDs).

It’s not actually the case that CS progress has entirely stopped (although it slowed substantially when the DARPA grants dried up), but every few years we get a new batch of devs who have a very limited…