[mindfulmark]

I think it's a good point and something I find myself worrying about as well. The hype around GraphQL and Apollo, for example, made me feel that I was losing serious time developing a REST APIs until I finally committed and decided to use it on a project. Obviously there ended up being a lot of trade-offs but in the end it was hard to tell if I saved any time at all. More generally, after falling for this a couple times of I realized that often you're just pushing problems around to different parts of the stack, or hiding complexity in places you'll eventually need to uncover. My experience says that the time consuming parts of building a product are rarely solved by adding flashy new services and libraries, and so I try to worry about these things less. On the other hand, trying out new stuff even just for an hour or two can give you a lot of insight into how much time it's actually going to save you - so worse case you just take it for a test run and see what it's actually all about.

[DJHenk]

I like to call this the: Law of Conservation of Complexity.

It does not matter how slice and dice things, the real world is a complex environment and as a result your application will be complex in some way too. You just can't sweep complexity under the carpet and pretend it's not there. It will always come back and bite you, in some way or the other.

[marcosdumay]

That law is very obviously broken.

It is evident that complexity can be increased at will. So any such law statement just assumes that any software you have didn't needlessly add some of it.

A very real problem of framing complexity this way is that the article is very likely adding a lot of complexity to the software. That's what most "let me simplify it for you" solutions do. And if you just state that complexity is constant, you won't even think about checking this.

[avip]

ok but taming complexity is what we do for a living. The Q is where to put the dirt. And under the carpet is better than on my bed.

I don't know this tool but for example if I switch my "webapp" to use redis, I push some complexity to "antirez". It does not disappear, but it's now being fed by developers better than I, and tested by x1000 users.

[davedx]

Exactly the same experience with GraphQL - indeed I think in the end it cost more time than REST. The thing is, GraphQL is a tool that really shines when you have... graph data (like Facebook). The problem is every company under the sun is now rushing to use it as if it's some kind of silver bullet because of all the hype.