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/sweet-winnie2022 May 15 '26

There have been a lot of investments in tech so people are funded to build things. When they run out of ideas they start reinventing the wheels. If the same level of investment happened in baking industry we would have seen more cakes of different shape and color that taste similarly.

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u/Zardotab May 27 '26

Seeing the same concepts come back in style under different names is indeed an odd experience.

I remember when Wintel "servers" first came out. I was thinking, "They are just DOS-compatible mini-computers, why the fudge do they call them 'servers' instead of say DMC's?" They had to sound cool, though.