Scaling down

from blog Scattered Thoughts, | ↗ original
The programming world is obsessed with scaling up. How many million lines of code can we maintain? How many petabytes of data can we process? How deeply can I customise this editor? More code, more data, more people, more machines. Nobody talks about scaling down. The vast majority of programs are never written. Ideas die stillborn because the startup cost is too high to bear. When we focus entirely on the asymptotic cost of developing large systems we neglect the...