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Well we can all relate to that. We've all got to eat (and stay warm & dry). I think I'm just getting to the "old man yells at cloud" stage of my career. I think of all of the things that we could have built over the years, and understand, I say this not to detract from all of the great software that has been built, but to lament the fact that devs spend so much time spinning their wheels these days (when not reinventing them, or trying to fit a square one on a race car) that we have spent so much opportunity cost that could have been the next big thing or the better version of an old thing. I would just implore people to go back and look at the history of computing, and the things we had back then (even if they were research demos or ahead-of-their-time pipe dreams), and remember that we have 100,000-1,000,000x the compute (or more) than we had when these older things were built. We can do better. And remember, not every abstraction is a useful one, not every appeal from authority should be taken as gospel, that creating software can be one of the most creative and expressive endeavors one can undertake, that there is no greater joy than seeing people use the things you build (or help build), and that there's no such thing as perfect software (but we should always strive to get as close as reasonably possible). |
would it be OK for me to steal your analogy? It's great!
In the team I'm currently leading, we have made the same observation, with stuff getting more complicated without anything substantial to show for it. In a way we're having a harder time getting out features than twenty years ago, but somehow that's "progress".
As an experiment, I had one of my juniors rewrite a (admittedly small) frontend with Go templates and HTMX, and not only did they have a blast doing it, they were surprised at how simple everything suddenly was. Give that one a try, it's worth it!
That said, there are frontends with requirements that actually do need all that framework crap. Once you want 3D stuff that a user can move around with the mouse, you pretty much have no other choice. While those special cases are rare, people prefer to learn one framework and use it for every nail they see lying around instead of looking at all the other tools in their shed...