Helps to have more of the quote:

He said that programming today is “More like science. You grab this piece of library and you poke at it. You write programs that poke it and see what it does. And you say, ‘Can I tweak it to do the thing I want?'”. The “analysis-by-synthesis” view of SICP — where you build a larger system out of smaller, simple parts — became irrelevant.

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mwcampbell 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Shouldn't that make us want to fight to simplify our software stacks to the point where we can do analysis by synthesis, building from simple, well-understood parts, again?

	▲	guhidalg a day ago \| parent [-]
		You can certainly do that if you restrict software to be a mathematical artifact instead of an executable running on one of 3 kernels with different APIs and behaviors, let alone the mountain of dependencies your code will build and link against. The reality is that the machines we write software for are complex, and trying to abstract it away and simplify it will introduce more abstractions that someone has to understand and deal with when they inevitably leak. It's not all bad, all this shit we're writing makes a lot of money.

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HPsquared 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

We've gone from synthesis to distillation.