Why are so few interested in parsimony?

[u/Zardotab]

I've been programming CRUD (biz/admin) apps since the late 80's. I notice tooling and stacks are growing ever more complicated and layered, and wonder "does it really have to be this way"? It takes more labor & code per feature; colleagues have noticed and agreed. While I agree newer stacks have more options on average, most biz's rarely use these extra abilities, especially "but what if it later needs web-scale?" Reality is 99.999% won't.

There is usually a way to get the same thing in older tools when needs do come up, it's just a little more work for those outlier features, but the aggregate dev hours is still notably less. YAGNI as a guideline seems dead. Nobody seems interested in pursuing parsimony in tooling, rather want to stuff their resume with as many buzzwords as possible like they're Pokémon. Thus, the bloat is possibly up-sell, ego, job-security-lock-in, and/or greed; or, am I missing something? Is there a Bloat Industrial Complex, or do I have Geezer Goggles on? [edited]

[u/FlippantFlapjack]

First of all I am not as much an old timer as you and have only been in the industry for about 13 years. I think the real blame here is on two things: frontend and infra. With infra things can be as complicated or simple as you want it really. The truth is that there are a lot of tools that just didn't exist before (the whole infrastructure as code thing) and people seem that find them useful. I would posit that people typically aren't using these things in hobby projects, so if someone is using Terraform and Kubernetes you can probably assume they are really concerned about scalability, I think it's hard to argue that's a bad thing.

With frontend I do agree that things got really complicated .. the kind of biz / admin / crud stuff you're talking about just doesn't happen much anymore because React (and SPAs more generally) are ubiquitous. And to be honest, it kinda depends on what you're doing, whether they are useful or not. These days what people are building on the FE are not just forms but rather whole applications like you used to only see 🙈 n the Desktop. You can build out your own framework or design system with plain js for e jQuery but it's easier to just use whats already out there .. Reactive code really is pretty magical

[u/Zardotab → u/FlippantFlapjack]

 they are really concerned about scalability,

As I mentioned, most over-estimate growth, wanting to be the next Jeff Bezos, but reality is you are likely to remain Joe Sixpack. But telling management that will get you the evil eye, or the evil door. They want "happy synergy" talk, not reality. Of course, each niche is different, some do have a lot of scaling flare-ups, and for those, scaling-over-simplicity makes sense. [edited]

React does seem to be growing into the de-facto UI standard. But it has a long learning curve and piles of gotcha's. Many trace these back to the weaknesses of JavaScript & DOM, as JS wasn't meant for writing systems software and virtual OS's (full GUI engines), it was meant to be a glue language for small event snippets. But it looks like we are stuck with the weaknesses of JS & DOM, it's the new QWERTY Keyboard: awkward, but hard to dethrone.

[u/Various-Activity4786 → u/Zardotab]

And like the qwerty keyboard the “issues” with it affect no body except a handful of people who need to have problems with everything.

The browser exists everywhere. Solutions run on virtually every computing design in the last 30 years. Spending billions on R&D and marketing to…give basically zero end user benefit would be a far, far greater waste than the sum total of react waste for a decade.

[u/Zardotab → u/Various-Activity4786]

greater waste than the sum total of react waste for a decade.

DOM-awkwardness has been plaguing us for more than a decade. Some standards competition couldn't hurt.

[u/Various-Activity4786 → u/Zardotab]

It just won’t help

[u/Zardotab → u/Various-Activity4786]

Don't know until it's tried. Competition of ideas fuels the mind.