Software reuse is more like an organ transplant than snapping Lego blocks (2011)
This makes me realize: the one example I can think of where software has been "Lego-like" is Unix piping. I'm not a Unix purist or anything, but they really hit on something special when it came to "code talking to other code".<p>Speculating about what made it stand apart: it seems like the (enforced) simplicity of the interfaces between pieces of code. Just text streams; one in, one out, nothing more nothing less. No coming up with a host of parallel, named streams that all have their own behaviors that need to be documented. And good luck coming up with a complicated data protocol built atop your text stream; it won't work with anything else and so nobody will use your program.<p>Interface complexity was harshly discouraged just by the facts-on-the-ground of the ecosystem.<p>Compare that with the average library interface, or framework, or domain-specific language, or REST API, etc. etc. and it becomes obvious why integrating any of those things is more like performing surgery.