I think some of the technologies he lists are just bad, not over-engineered. Usually "complicated" and "bad" are signs of not doing enough engineering; just sh

I think some of the technologies he lists are just bad, not over-engineered. Usually "complicated" and "bad" are signs of not doing enough engineering; just shipping what you have and bolting on haphazard extensions as people think of them. XML was that, and so were XML-RPC and SOAP. You can see this happening with the newer technologies. JSON has a lot of quirks, like not having binary or integer types. So people have bolted those on. JSON doesn't have schema definitions (which are nice if you, say, want to generate code to talk to an API), so we're bolting those on (JSON Schema, OpenAPI, etc.) Admittedly, it's all a lot easier to understand this time around. To some extent, I'm not sure if we as a field learn from the past, or just reinvent it every 15 years and do a little better accidentally. (Remember the PC revolution, and how you wouldn't have to connect to a big mainframe to do computing? That revolution died and now we carry around $1500 dumb terminals in our pockets, while all the software runs on a mainframe!)