Comment by klysm

That is not a _justification_ - merely an _explanation_ of how we got here. I fully agree that a historical understanding of how we got to where we are is essential for understanding why we have what we have. However, it's critical to not conflate the history and evolution as a justification for why the current system sucks so much! I agree there is a massive amount of complexity and branching to consider, but autotools and the whole C ecosystem does a terrible job of tackling that complexity, and introduces a huge amount of accidental complexity into the solution space.

The co-evolution of hardware, software, and all other moving targets has landed us in a fairly abysmal local maxima. More recently developed toolchains (e.g. zig, rust, etc.) show us that there are much better ways to tackle these problems. Of course they introduce other ones, but we can do so much better.