A Generation Lost in the Bazaar (2012)
Stone cathedrals (the ones still standing, anyhow) were built by generations of skilled craftspeople guided by a self-perpetuating hierarchy.  The hierarchy had access to, and the craftspeople had the benefit of, ways of extracting wealth from the economy.  The availability of unlimited resources allowed them to cover for plenty of mistakes.<p>Sure, the cathedral structures look elegant and eternal. That&#x27;s because time favors the stable ones. The other ones fell down long ago. It&#x27;s the same reason that the orbits of planets are seemingly so well-ordered: everthing that wasn&#x27;t in such an orbit has crashed into something else and disappeared. (Look at the surface of the moon for evidence of that.)<p>Music and literature work like that. We think the age of Mozart was particularly wonderful, because we have Mozart&#x27;s music. But there was plenty of other music in that era, most of it bellowed by bad musicians in taverns. That&#x27;s not so different from today&#x27;s music scene.<p>Why shouldn&#x27;t software work like that? Why isn&#x27;t Dr. Kamp&#x27;s lament morally the same as the lament of the guy with the cabin in the woods? I&#x27;m talking about the guy who finds himself with more and more neighbors, and grouses that &quot;nobody respects the wilderness any more.&quot;<p>We all respect elegant lasting structures (fork &#x2F; exec &#x2F; stdin &#x2F; stdout is one such structure).  a creative field with huge output will generate more elegant lasting structures. We just can&#x27;t tell which ones will survive from where we sit in the middle of it all.