http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.htmlPeople in the industry are very excited about various ideas that nominally help you deal with large code bases, such as IDEs that can manipulate code as "algebraic structures", and search indexes, and so on. These people tend to view code bases much the way construction workers view dirt: they want great big machines that can move the dirt this way and that. There's conservation of dirt at work: you can't compress dirt, not much, so their solution set consists of various ways of shoveling the dirt around. There are even programming interview questions, surely metaphorical, about how you might go about moving an entire mountain of dirt, one truck at a time.
Industry programmers are excited about solutions to a big non-problem. It's just a mountain of dirt, and you just need big tools to move it around. The tools are exciting but the dirt is not.