M by N Code Explosions

Back to Perlis-Thompson Principle

Some concrete examples:

• Linux distros!
  • I know this from Oil. It is annoying to have 10 different distros! You have M applications and N packaging tasks. There are some tools that try to ameliorate this.
• Shell Completion
  • M applications to write completions for, and N shells.
  • This is what Shellac (Shell Autocompletion) was supposed to solve! However I think most shells including bash are too weak to support it at the "user level"
• Language package managers (Python, JavaScript, Rust, ...) vs. operating systems. This partly explains the XKCD comic -- Python packaging is messy. (At the very least it's hard to test)
• Google's cluster management: You're using 3.5 distributed operating systems / cluster managers when you use Kubernetes
• Google service turnup (Broccoli Man, etc.)
  • Unix and Microservice Platforms by Brandom Bloom
  • auth/metrics/config/monitoring are M things you have to do for every service.
• Some parts of Windows? Well COM reduces the code explosion, just like Unix pipes do. It's dynamic / runtime software composition, not static / compile time.
• Docker
  • duplicates push and pull
  • duplicates remote storage -- i.e. with the registry

Non-open source

• The "Send To" functionality in iOS and Android operating systems.