[1/*] If we take the chance that a tool (compiler, linker, batch, whatever) remains working for a particular codebase after one year as a given probability p, then the chance that build remains working after x years is p^xn, where n is the number of tools used in the build.
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[10/*] All of this is already something you know intuitively. Projects with lots of dependencies never work out-of-the-box. You are constantly updating, patching, and struggling to get their builds working, because every time something downstream changes, somebody has to fix it.
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[11/*] The "dependency culture" of modern programming has put us into a state where software requires perpetual, constant maintenance. No longer can we take a build and say "this works" and come back to it in a year. Great for job security, horrible for software quality.
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[12/*] As for speculation, I wonder, at least in part, if this answers the questions me and other people like me have, which is how do companies like Twitter employ thousands of developers while seemingly producing almost no additional software or improvements?
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[13/*] Well, if you assume that Twitter's collective codebase is a 1000+ dependency nightmare, as I assume it probably is, then the math kind of tells us the answer: the vast, vast majority of their time will have to be spent simply keeping their existing code working.
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