If someone were to write code to their software fixing bugs, how and why can that break other code/features if it’s not meant for that? A common example are Nvidia drivers “breaking” or Microsoft patching one feature but breaking many, many other features.

If code is meant to be hyper specific, how can it affect any other feature?

  • scoste@discuss.tchncs.de
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    14 hours ago

    Imagine you’re building a house, and you notice that a wall is not quite in the right spot, so you need to move it over a few inches. Sounds like a small change (just a few inches), but it’s easy to imagine that the construction might affect other parts of the house, or that you might see issues later because of the wall being moved over.

    Not a perfect analogy, but a software change can sometimes seem small (just a few inches), but actually require a lot of complication

    Software is generally built up in layers from reusable pieces. If there’s an assumption or a change in a lower layer or in one of those reusable pieces, things that might seem unrelated can break if they share one of those pieces