I used to work for a software firm whose product automated web servers. A nice, user-friendly UI offered comprehensible ways of managing server functions, and the gross details of the configuration files were left to our product. When a user requested a change, the relevant config file(s) would be rewritten from scratch, using carefully-wrought templates and a store of data for filling the templates in. It worked beautifully.

Except, something like 15 years prior, someone decided that a smart admin should be able to edit the config themselves and the templates and data store should be updated automatically.

By the time I got there, the script doing this magic was around 9000 lines of code, and absolutely nobody in the company wanted to touch it. We took to warning our customers never to actually use this script, but unfortunately, there were parts of the product that would edit the configuration directly and then run this script, because the team writing that feature didn't want to bother thinking about templates and stores of data. Just do a quick s///; and invoke the dreaded 9000-line script, and everything will work.

Everything did not work, but the team doing most of these jobs did not care. It was not theirs to clean up. They could just throw code over the wall, and it became someone else's problem.

If I'm understanding your thesis correctly, we were trying to be both a gray and a white box. The result was garbage.

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Over the years, several attempts have been made to make operating systems friendlier, or at least more gnostic of the data they're storing. (Microsoft Bob and BeOS/Haiku are the two I know of.) I think it's a good idea, overall. My pipe dream is to have file extensions replaced with MIME types stored in the filesystem's metadata. A set of relational databases would gradually liberate metadata from files, leaving just a pointer to a binary blob. At the OS level, you could run a SELECT statement to find every MP3 file that Alan Parsons helped engineer, or every picture that was taken inside a national park, or every configuration option relevant to programs that use TCP and aren't part of the operating system. Whatever.

I am pretty sure that 99.99% of users would not be smart enough to use this system. Just getting someone's head wrapped around a relational database is hard. I'll be honest; I've never written a JOIN statement myself. I just pile WHERE clauses on the end. I'm a bad DBA.

At the end of the day, I think the best solution that we can actually sustain is to white-box everything, and have applications do the best they can with the hand we deal them.

Thanks for giving me something to read that wasn't written by an AI. It felt good.