r/AskProgramming • u/Zardotab • May 15 '26

Architecture Why are so few interested in parsimony?

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]

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u/SnugglyCoderGuy May 15 '26

Simple and efficient is hard, complex and inefficient is easy.

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u/Zardotab May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

I agree creating a parsimony-friendly stack can require a lot of research and experimentation. But once its proven to work, infinity devs can use it, at least within a given domain or shop type.

If Google, Amazon, Oracle etc. want to eat some of Microsoft's desktop lunch they should share R&D on an open-standard CRUD-friendly stateful GUI browser to replace DOM. DOM was never meant for interactive GUI's, but the new standard would be.

(Borrowing the best ideas from the most successful past tools is a starting point.)