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I fully agree that composing modules written by independent teams is necessary and good for productivity. We don’t want to reinvent wheels, and layering on top

I fully agree that composing modules written by independent teams is necessary and good for productivity. We don’t want to reinvent wheels, and layering on top of standard abstractions is generally better even when the fit isn’t 100% perfect. My problem is that if each of those layers is bloated to 5-10x the size and complexity they should be, then we have a problem. This can compound, not just additively but multiplicatively. Eventually you end up in a quagmire where nothing works right and you can’t fix anything because that would just reveal more breakage at layers you don’t control. One thing I noticed over this last week is how much nicer it is to work with something like ASP.NET Core 8.0 instead of the old ASP.NET MVC 5. It’s leaner and meaner, but has enough “batteries included” that I don’t have to drag hundreds of megabytes of slightly incompatible third-party modules in just to get essentials such as JSON and Dependency Injection. As an industry we need to acknowledge the need for cohesive and consistent platforms, not just components. We need to occasionally clean house and consolidate, not just keep throwing packages over the fence and calling it a day.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
> As an industry we need to acknowledge the need for cohesive and consistent platforms, not just components. Agreed, but it's also, apparently, a difficult bar to clear. Apple manages to do it, by having iron-fisted control of the hardware, the operating system, and the SDKs. But even they are starting to fray. I've been writing Apple code since 1986, and I'm getting familiar with some of the newer stuff, like CreateML and SwiftUI. There's a ... difference ... in the way that documentation is being handled. In The Days of Yore, we had Inside Macintosh, which was a multi-volume Encyclopedia Britannica-like set of tomes, delving deep into the operating system and SDKs. It was written by really skilled people; often with advanced and esoteric degrees, and with great writing chops. These days, not so much. I'm glad for bloggers and online enthusiasts.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Microsoft land is the same. The first few versions of C# had amazing documentation and the libraries were very consistent and cohesive. GUI programming especially was a breeze. Now Microsoft can’t even make a GUI framework that is actually used by anyone, including themselves!

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

> As an industry we need to acknowledge the need for cohesive and consistent platforms, not just components. Agreed, but it's also, apparently, a difficult bar to clear. Apple manages to do it, by having iron-fisted control of the hardware, the operating system, and the SDKs. But even they are starting to fray. I've been writing Apple code since 1986, and I'm getting familiar with some of the newer stuff, like CreateML and SwiftUI. There's a ... difference ... in the way that documentation is being handled. In The Days of Yore, we had Inside Macintosh, which was a multi-volume Encyclopedia Britannica-like set of tomes, delving deep into the operating system and SDKs. It was written by really skilled people; often with advanced and esoteric degrees, and with great writing chops. These days, not so much. I'm glad for bloggers and online enthusiasts.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Microsoft land is the same. The first few versions of C# had amazing documentation and the libraries were very consistent and cohesive. GUI programming especially was a breeze. Now Microsoft can’t even make a GUI framework that is actually used by anyone, including themselves!