Yes, so much in programming is so much simpler than we think it is. I first came across this when creating a demo for a smartpen that was supposed to have live

Yes, so much in programming is so much simpler than we think it is. I first came across this when creating a demo for a smartpen that was supposed to have live interactivity features, which I was going to implement by putting a little HTTP server on the pen. When it came to simulating my solution, I took away features until I came up with the "serving static files over HTTP" trick the post describes. Then I realised that I could do the whole thing by just putting the demo files in a directory and changing the base URL in the client from https:// https://... to file:///... Another time we built a backend system for feed processing and delayed putting in a database until we discovered we didn't actually need it.[1]. The standard operating procedure at the time was to create an Oracle DB for everything, including a system that needed a total of 6 data items. Wow. My boss at Wunderlist used to brag that the database we used for the iOS/macOS clients was just a bunch of JSON files in the filesystem. Worked wonders and was really, really fast. These and many other experiences led me to come up with Storage Combinators[2]. Once you try them, you'll wonder why things always have to be so complicated. And yes, I agree with the idea that "gluing complex libraries together that we don't fully understand" is a problem. And also with the notion that it's an achievement that we can and should be proud of, at least partially, because that used to be something we couldn't do at all[3]. Nowadays we can at least do it badly[4]. My take on this is that we don't have the right kinds of glue, particularly procedural/functional abstraction is often no the right glue, and OOP notwithstanding that's really all we got. [5][6] [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-9299-3_11 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4614-9299-3_... [2] https://2019.splashcon.org/details/splash-2019-Onward-papers/7/Storage-Combinators https://2019.splashcon.org/details/splash-2019-Onward-papers... [3] https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/07/glue-code-is-success-condition.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/07/glue-code-is-success-con... [4] https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/06/glue-dark-matter-of-software.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2021/06/glue-dark-matter-of-soft... [5] https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/02/why-architecture-oriented-programming.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/02/why-architecture-oriente... [6] https://objective.st https://objective.st