[tluyben2]

I do not think that is his point though; it is not that you dream or like making that complexity, it is that you are forced to make it by current tooling and languages. You are and people you know probably fall into the group of exceptions that can handle that kind of complexity (to some extent) and try to simplify it. In the non HN, corporate world of a lot of companies, this is not the case. Many large corporates do not do version management, code reviews, refactoring or anything you consider standard. You are the exception. And that is mostly because of the tooling; for most beginners React/Node simply is far more challenging than Visual Basic or HTML/PHP. For people who just want to solve a small problem and share that solution they made, learning 3-4 languages and installing bucketloads of tooling and libraries is just not a step forward.

By using that kind of tooling you are already acknowledging what the article says in some ways. By using programming languages and editors that let you figure out what the computer can do much faster (like figuring out, at edit time, the result of a bunch of if then else statements for instance), you are getting further away from simple.

And yet this is our normal and it hardly changes over time. So yeah, as someone who has programmed for over 30 years I see the D&D and Rubiks Cube comparison. We do not like it but that does not make it less true; it was easier to solve simple problems ‘fullstack’ when fullstack was 1 language and 1 simple install that had everything; in my opinion we did not evolve well here. It was easier to create most (No I am not talking about a Facebook; that is far from most) things when you did not have to worry about libraries or packaging for deployment. It always was a Rubiks Cube, but we are getting more D&D by the week imho.

And then there are the sort of things Edwards likes to experiment with; relevant live feedback during coding with enforceable prompts to repair simple things that your brain is just not (by far) as good or as fast at as a computer is.