It’s not stupid, no, but a “supporting foundation” is a largely just a seductive metaphor. It says, “Clearly software is like a building. Every building needs a solid foundation.” It doesn’t inspire engagement with other metaphors, like considering software to be a tree that must be grown incrementally and as a product of dynamic forces. It doesn’t map knowledge from the building domain to knowledge in the software domain.
Or that, with software, you can always rip out the foundation and replace it. And you're working on it as you work on the rest of the "building" anyway.
The difficulty of working on lower abstraction layers doesn't scale with the amount of higher layers. Unlike with buildings or bridges, there's no gravity in software, no loads and stresses that need to be collected and routed through foundations and into the ground, or balanced out at the core. In software, you can just redo the foundation, and usually it only affects things immediately connected to it.
A set of analogies for software that are better than civil engineering:
- Assembling puzzles.
- Painting.
- Working on a car that's been cut in half through the middle along its symmetry plane.
- Working on buildings and bridges as a Matrix Lord who lives in the 4th dimension.
All these examples share a crucial characteristic also shared by software: your view into it and construction work is being done in a dimension orthogonal to the dimension along which the artifact does its work. You can see and access (and modify, and replace) any part of it at any time.
The real "foundations" of a software system are probably its data structures rather than the infrastructure/backend. It's still an iffy metaphor though for the reasons you've given.
I love this insight, I just recently learned about the hidden HN feature to favorite comments and used it for the first time to favorite your comment. It's always a pleasure to read your comments on HN, I noticed your handle popping up here and there and would like to thank you for your contributions. If you had a collection of all your comments on HN printed in a book I think I would buy it:)
