alt Hacker NewsSoftware folks love over-engineering things. If you look at the web coding craze of a few years ago, people started piling up tooling on top of tooling (frameworks, build pipelines, linting, generators etc.) for something that could also be zero-config, and just a handful of files for simple projects.
I guess this happens when you're too deep in a topic and forget that eventually the overhead of maintaining the tooling outweights the benefits. It's a curse of our profession. We build and automate things, so we naturally want to build and automate tooling for doing the things we do.
I don’t think those web tooling piles are over-engineered per se, they address huge challenges at Google and Facebook, but the profession is way too driven by hype and fashion and the result is a lot of cargo culting of stuff from Big Dogs unquestioningly. Wrong tooling for the job creates that bubble of over complicated app development.
Inventing GraphQL and React and making your own PHP compiler are absolutely insane and obviously wrong decisions — for everyone who isn’t Facebook. With Facebook revenue and Facebooks army of resume obsessed PHP monkeys they strike me as elegant technological solutions to otherwise intractable organizational issues. Insane, but highly profitable and fast moving. Outside of that context using React should be addressing clear pain points, not a dogmatic default.
We’re seeing some active pushback on it now online, but so much damage has been done. Embracing progressive complexity of web apps/sites should leave the majority as barebones with minimal if any JavaScript.
Facebook solutions for Facebook problems. Most of us can be deeply happy our 99 problems don’t include theirs, and live a simpler easier life.