[MichaelGG]

I just had to troubleshoot a small helper app that took some HTTP input and wrote to a DB. The code was in C# and had about 10 files spread over 3 namespaces, plus a separate test infrastructure project. All sorts of factory models were used to setup an "HTTP pipeline" and authentication modules. The problem I had to fix: after a server upgrade, authentication was broken.

After digging around for a while, I discovered there was no bug. The partner's client code had the auth disabled, and the pervious server was misconfigured to not require auth. All which would not have been a problem if the system just did an "if headers.auth != "Basic ..." - but buried in this forest of stuff, it was overlooked.

It seems that some developers just love their edifices. They build all this "infrastructure", expanding code by an order of magnitude or more. It's considered good and robust and so, so much writing online is dedicated to this pursuit. I think it gives those programmers a feeling of import, as if they're really architecting something, not just pushing a few form fields around.

Even on the line by line basis, it's shocking how they love verbosity. Type inference? Nope, that makes things too compact and hard to read. Higher order functions to wrap up common patterns? Too difficult to understand. I'm not sure if developers simply lack the tiny bit of extra intelligence, or if they've tried it and honestly concluded that overflowing verbosity is the key to readability. Either way, it's sad, and holding back progress slightly.

[tluyben2]

Right, there seems to be a group thinking like this and a group aggressing against it and vice versa. I recently had a discussion about it and the 'architecting' bunch (we need 20 layer deep directories with 1000s of file with < 10 lines / file) keep shouting about maintainability. The problem is, that after 25 years of professional coding in many different circumstances, I see that most good programmers are much quicker to understand the 'non architected' (putting between '' because good code is not gibberish, it is architected but not by randomly generating design patterns and applying them) and the not so good programmers say that the 'architected' code is much more maintainable but take weeks or months longer to do anything worthwhile as they are 'grokking the architectural choices'.