Hear, hear! This post provides a perfect example of the utter failure of software engineering in the real world. I am reminded of it every time I try to install software, with all the ridiculous dependencies and multiple versions. Instead of addressing the serious foundational issues facing software development and architecture, the geniuses are busy inventing the latest, greatest programming language, creating even more problems.
Computer science and engineering departments should use these situations to train their students.
> the geniuses are busy inventing the latest, greatest programming language, creating even more problems.
There is some truth in your microrant here. I would restate it like this: Instead of getting excited with how expressive is a new sexy multi-injection functional language when you write the nth Fibonacci sequence, I would think it more realist and constructive to get excited with how a new language or a new extension of an existing language allow to handle module and package dependencies in a clean, safe and explicit way.
It resonates also with my work today: I spend a few hours removing those evil "import *" from our codebase... (Python's "we are grownups" mantra is nice, but I think a piece of the quote is missing: "we are grownups, thus we run pylint and comply to all the rules, except a few carefully chosen ones")
Computer science and engineering departments should use these situations to train their students.