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Don't feel too bad; the pop culture side of programming (a lot of HN) is profoundly anti-design of any type. I think that's a surprising characterization; it d

Don't feel too bad; the pop culture side of programming (a lot of HN) is profoundly anti-design of any type. I think that's a surprising characterization; it doesn't jive with my own perception (as subjective as that may be). I think the past decade has (rightly or wrongly) seen a reaction in our industry against enterprise-style "architecture astronauts" but that doesn't equate to being "anti-design". (I'm thinking of the emergence of Rails-like frameworks vs. the JEE stack, and then the emergence of micro-frameworks like Flask/Express/Sinatra after that.) Simple/reduced structure is a valid design choice (of course there are trade-offs that come with that, and of course they aren't always appropriate, but I don't think that means it's popular to be "anti-design").

jalfresi 12y ago
" but that doesn't equate to being "anti-design" I agree fully. I feel that the shift has come about because there has been an unconscious recognition that restricting your tools to one particular problem domain is a valid constraint to make on a design. Enterprise scale, "architecture astronauts" and the like were trying to build tools with which you could build anything, for anyone. And it's clear from the results that this is just a vector for complexity to creep in. Focused tools, from libs to frameworks unashamedly limit themselves to one particular problem domain, or at least used to. I've certainly noticed a shift in that these hard learnt lessons are being ignored in order to add features to frameworks etc; which increase their applicable scope, with the increase in complexity that arises. The primary driver of which appears to be the younger generations desire to use the same tools for different purposes rather than learn a new set of applicable tools for a different problem domain. A good example is the shift from v1 Zend Framework to Zend Framework 2 which just appears to be so heavily "Java/Enterprise" influenced I simply refuse to use it; its far far too complex a framework for what is essentially a framework for building web sites. Building web sites is simple. These modern frameworks make it massively more complex than it needs to be.

jalfresi 12y ago

" but that doesn't equate to being "anti-design" I agree fully. I feel that the shift has come about because there has been an unconscious recognition that restricting your tools to one particular problem domain is a valid constraint to make on a design. Enterprise scale, "architecture astronauts" and the like were trying to build tools with which you could build anything, for anyone. And it's clear from the results that this is just a vector for complexity to creep in. Focused tools, from libs to frameworks unashamedly limit themselves to one particular problem domain, or at least used to. I've certainly noticed a shift in that these hard learnt lessons are being ignored in order to add features to frameworks etc; which increase their applicable scope, with the increase in complexity that arises. The primary driver of which appears to be the younger generations desire to use the same tools for different purposes rather than learn a new set of applicable tools for a different problem domain. A good example is the shift from v1 Zend Framework to Zend Framework 2 which just appears to be so heavily "Java/Enterprise" influenced I simply refuse to use it; its far far too complex a framework for what is essentially a framework for building web sites. Building web sites is simple. These modern frameworks make it massively more complex than it needs to be.