2 ms·

I've mentally tried to spec out what that would look like. It's weird and very unlike how we operate today. It is not clear to me that anything I've mentally sk

by jerf 7y ago

I've mentally tried to spec out what that would look like. It's weird and very unlike how we operate today. It is not clear to me that anything I've mentally sketched out is a win even if it were magically manifested for me with no effort. I don't think this is accidental complexity, it's essential complexity. To the extent that it seemed easier in the past, it's because we ignored some of that complexity and paid the price. Putting up a truly production-grade service is fundamentally hard. Now, I think it probably will get easier over time as we grapple with these problems. Integrating with auth, for instance, should be easier, and that can be solved with some more code, and formal and informal standards. It's not all essential complexity. But I think a good deal of it is, or at least it is from anything remotely resembling our current perspective.

avmich 7y ago
> I don't think this is accidental complexity, it's essential complexity. I think this is the kind of essential complexity which we faced when developing operating systems. OSes are fundamentally helpers, which don't solve the application problem, but make the solving easier (a good OS makes it easier by much). So we can and should use the results which we got from OS development.
eandre 7y ago
I agree that the parts are needed and the complexity essential. What I mean is that we need higher-order primitives that abstract away and shield us from the conplexity. Just like we don't need to spend time crafting TCP packets by hand, I don't think we should have to mess with transport protocols, writing RPC calls by hand, juggling yaml files to stand up Kubernetes clusters, and so on. I've been working on building something like this for a year now [1] and it's certainly quite different from how we do backend development normally,but that's also the point :). The tricky part is to find abstractions that are general and non-leaky so they can be leveraged to build a wide variety of software. Feedback appreciated! [1] https://encore.dev https://encore.dev

by jerf 7y ago

avmich 7y ago

> I don't think this is accidental complexity, it's essential complexity. I think this is the kind of essential complexity which we faced when developing operating systems. OSes are fundamentally helpers, which don't solve the application problem, but make the solving easier (a good OS makes it easier by much). So we can and should use the results which we got from OS development.

eandre 7y ago

I agree that the parts are needed and the complexity essential. What I mean is that we need higher-order primitives that abstract away and shield us from the conplexity. Just like we don't need to spend time crafting TCP packets by hand, I don't think we should have to mess with transport protocols, writing RPC calls by hand, juggling yaml files to stand up Kubernetes clusters, and so on. I've been working on building something like this for a year now [1] and it's certainly quite different from how we do backend development normally,but that's also the point :). The tricky part is to find abstractions that are general and non-leaky so they can be leveraged to build a wide variety of software. Feedback appreciated! [1] https://encore.dev https://encore.dev