[technomancy]

> I think the problem is humans just aren't smart enough to do the work.

I think this is true if you define "the work" as building on top of the infrastructure we have today. I believe we're capable of building conceptually clean, non-ball-of-mud architectures, but the need to interoperate with piles and piles of legacy systems forces compromises into the design. Just look at a typical web application stack; you've got layers and layers of cruft, and nobody is able to pull off a bold move that tears layers off; the best we can do is add more layers on the top.

[verbin217]

Using express in nodejs versus php jerry-rigged into apache is sort of an instance of what you're describing.

[technomancy]

Technically yes, but in a way that's so trivial so as to be basically meaningless.

[verbin217]

The amount I have to think about is considerably less. All the complexity just melts into Functions and Objects. There's similar stuff happening in React with inline styles. Mixins, variables, custom-properties, state-dependence, automatic-prefixes, and more are available without language extension when styles are expressed as Objects of css properties. Whether or not they're satisfactory, there are occasional efforts to derive more functionality from fewer abstractions.