Brian Kernighan on the origins of Unix

I agree that there's plenty of talent and business incentives to do it again, but I think the unmentioned missing factor is complexity. These days, there are so many open source projects that have tens of millions of lines of code, it's hard to believe that two people could sit down and in a short time come up with something that can compete with any of it. It's hard to even fathom an operating system that is only 9000 lines of code in today's world.

Today's talented engineers and developers all have to make do with incremental improvement projects. Though, that's probably been true for most of history and such improvements often are less known and less appreciated than they deserve to be. Planet Money[1] recently made the point that small incremental improvements to the humble nail eventually radically changed the way construction was done throughout the world.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/01/12/1072557499/what-nails-can-...