Yes, let’s all go back to coding in assembly!
― Sarcastic comment by arrogant developer`
I like this bit because it really is a common answer whenever someone complains about how maddening/inefficient some tooling is nowadays. Like, why the fuck is this [OS EXCLUSIVE] application made with electron and running its own node server? It’s what “they know”, fuck it if there are alternatives that could do a much better job
About half a year ago I stumbled upon some front-end web developers who did not know that you can create a website without a deployment tool and that you don’t need any JavaScript at all, even when the website takes payment.
Said front-end dev is probably too young to have perused the 2004 and earlier internet. Javascript already existed, but it was more of an afterthought. When a site wanted to be flashy and visual, it used Flash, but I don’t think any halfway decent site was crazy enough to leave the payment inside a Flash page
I like this bit because it really is a common answer whenever someone complains about how maddening/inefficient some tooling is nowadays.
I don’t think this is a valid take. What we see in these vague complains about levels of abstraction is actually an entirely different problem: people complaining that they don’t understand things, and they feel the cognitive load of specific aspects is too much for them to handle.
If the existing layers of abstraction were actually a problem and they solved nothing, and if removing them would solve everything, it would be trivial to remove them and replace them with the simpler solutions these critics idealize.
Except that never happens. Why is that, exactly?
I think that it’s because a) the abstraction does solve a problem, and b) the idealized solutions aren’t actually all that simple.
But I still agree with the article because I also think that a) the problem solved by the added abstraction isn’t practical, but emotional, and b) the idealized solutions aren’t all that complex, either.
It seems to me that many devs reach immediately for a tool or library, rather than looking into how to create their own solution, due more to fear of the unknown than a real drive for efficiency. And while learning the actual nuts and bolts of the task is rarely going to be the faster or easier option, it’s frequently (IMO) not going to be much slower or more difficult than learning how to integrate someone else’s solution. But at the end of it you’ll have learned a lot more than you would’ve by using a tool or library.
Another problem in the commercial world is accountability to management.
Many decades ago there used to be a saying in tech: “No-one ever got fired for buying IBM.'” What that meant was that even if IBM’s solution was completely beaten by something offered by one of their competitors, you personally may still be better off overall going with IBM. The reason being, if you went with the competitor, and everything worked out, the less tech-savvy managers were just as likely to pat you on the back as to assert that the IBM solution would’ve been even better. If the competitor’s solution didn’t meet expectations, you’d be hauled over the coals for going with some cowboy outfit instead of good old reliable IBM. Conversely, if you went with IBM and everything worked, everyone would be happy. But if you chose IBM and the project failed, it’d be, “Well, it’s not your fault. Who could’ve predicted that IBM wouldn’t come through?”
In the modern era, replace “IBM” with the current tool-of-the-month, and your manager will be demanding to know why you’re wasting time reinventing the wheel on the company’s dime.
I think that it’s because a) the abstraction does solve a problem, and b) the idealized solutions aren’t actually all that simple.
I’d go a step further and state quite bluntly that these critics do not even understand the problem that the abstraction solves, and their belief is formed based on their poor and limited understanding of the problem space.
Everyone can come up with simpler alternatives if they throw most requirements out of the window. That’s basically the ages old problem caused by major rewrites and their expected failure once the unknowns start to emerge.
But I still agree with the article because I also think that a) the problem solved by the added abstraction isn’t practical, but emotional, and b) the idealized solutions aren’t all that complex, either.
Hard disagree.
There is not a single technical argument refuting these abstraction layers; only ignorance of the problems they solve. It’s easy to come up with simpler solutions if you leave out whole sets of hard requirements.
The idealized solution never leaves the conceptual stage because the idealized solution is never thought all the way through and the key requirements are never gathered. That’s when the problems solved by the abstraction layers rear their head, and what forces these critics to face the fact that their proposed solution is inconveniently converging to the real world solution they are complaining about, but that they are reinventing the wheel poorly.
I’ll get to it soon. /s
Then teach us. Advocate for us. Help us improve and understand.
A very large part of the problem is that the people who are knowledgeable are often the ones that bought into the whole lone wolf coder shtick.
Most junior people I work with are interested and want to learn, but between high demands, no time to do it and senior devs who focus only on their own problems - it’s very hard to know how to learn and improve.
We can and need to solve this but it requires that we work together and actually sit down to bridge the knowledge gap.
A very large part of the problem is that the people who are knowledgeable are often the ones that bought into the whole lone wolf coder shtick.
I’d add that a large part of the problem is that we have people complaining about perceived problems without being able to present any kind of solution.
I think a part of it is how we look for information in the first place. If you search/ask “How do I do (task) in (environment)?”, you’re going to find out about various libraries/frameworks/whatever that abstract everything away for you. But if you instead look for information on “How do I do (task)?”, you’ll probably get more generalized information that you can take and use to write your own stuff from scratch. Try only to look for help related to your specific environment/language when you have a specific implementation issue, like how to access a file or get user input.
We also need a willingness to learn how things actually work. I see quite a few folks who seem to be so worried that they’ll never be able to understand some task that they unwittingly spend almost as much or even more time and effort learning all the ins and outs of someone else’s codebase as a way to avoid what they see as the scarier unknown.
Fortunately, I’ve seen an increase in the last year or two of people deliberately giving answers or writing tutorials that are “no-/low-library”, for people who want to know what’s actually going on in their programs.
I would never say to avoid all libraries or frameworks, because many of them are well-written (small, modular, stable) and can save us a lot of boilerplate coding. But there are at least as many libraries which suffer from “kitchen-sinkism”, where the authors want so much for their library to become the pre-eminent choice that it becomes a bloated tangle, trying to be all things to all people. This can be compounded by less-experienced coders including multiple huge libraries in one program, using only a fraction of each library’s features without realizing that there’s almost complete overlap. The cherry on top is when the end developer uses one of these libraries to do just one or two small tasks that could’ve been done in less than a dozen lines of standard code, if only someone had told them how, instead of sending them off to install yet another library.
I’m off two minds. On the one side, there is far too much reliance on black box libraries to do trivial things.
On the other, this complaint is decades old. Back in the late 80s there was a software developer for the apple iigs called FTA, which stood for Free Tools Association. They claimed that the tools in the os were too slow and you should code to the raw hardware.
I’m a gray developer and nothing makes me more get-off-my-lawn than too many levels of abstractions. :)
Interesting observation on the current trajectory of the software development environment
What do you think about the increased usage of AI to help developers code? I feel like AI is another step into the abstraction swamp
This AI stuff is annoying me. I don’t work in development - I’m a pentester and recently had to work on some scripts with a colleague.
He is a few years my senior and basically completely relies on ChatGPT for simple string matching and splitting in bash. I could not believe my eyes. He got ChatGPT to spit out a command that didn’t work exactly as we needed it to because it was looking for the wrong string. It was a really simple fix but he again had to ask ChatGPT for how to fix it, until I was like “let me do it”.
It’s not that he’s dumb or anything, but I feel like he just grew completely lazy from that and doesn’t even want to think anymore. Later on he was troubleshooting the same script for a few hours until he noticed that ChatGPT output messed up the order of lines and tried to access a variable that was only declared in the next line.
I think ChatGPT and whatever else are really useful tools, but people tend to use them as shortcuts to learning instead of getting things done quicker. That is in everyone’s own responsibility - I just have the hunch that my job will get way more interesting with a new generation of incompetent developers 😁
A big percentage of so-called experts today only know how to configure some kind of hype-tool, but they understand nothing about how things work at the deeper level. This is a real challenge and a big problem for the future.
“Don’t worry about it. Large Language Models are going to fix it.” - Some CEO, probably.
Edit: This is the bit that so few people outside the profession understand: I’m not being paid to write it, I’m being paid to try to understand it enough to change it safely.
Most of the time I don’t understand it well quite enough*, and chaos ensues. I would worry more about that, except that it turns out my paycheck clears either way, most of the time.
- Disclaimer: I’m a genius, but I wasn’t there when their special snowflake software was written.
The only problem that can’t be solved by adding a layer of abstraction - too many layers of abstraction.
But maybe that is only because we haven’t tried an AbstractionAppletFactoryFactory pattern, though? /s
I develop an interactive climate / future scenario model, now in scala, earlier in java, almost no dependencies. No visualisation frameworks - the diverse plots hand coded in scala (transpiles using scala.js, makes SVGs on demand). The science code from demography through economy emissions, bioegeochemistry, to climate - just scala, no interface to other languages / models, no “solver” tool. Data input just text files -easy to check. Some modules over 20 years old (except converted java -> scala), still work reliably. It’s efficient as all client-side, no IO/net between adjustments and results. Seems no big institute would employ me for such model dev because my experience doesn’t tick the boxes of all the current fashionable frameworks. But at least I can share a way to explore the future for ourselves … and yes it’s bleak but not so dire as many people here seem to assume, we still have choices.
One choice I think you’ve nicely demonstrated: the choice of a solid base and not choosing to add dependencies.
Choosing not to do something can be hard.
Also double points for having a sustainable software project that helps with environmental sustainability. Really walking the walk haha
More like sprinting the sprint!
Hi, thanks for the encouragement, delayed response due focusing on the code, and a related conference, and now trying to keep up with the COP. As it happens, the “ratchet” system of pledges created in Paris (COP21) is an iterative algorithm - start with wild guesses and gradually improve them by feedback - this made sense given the weaknesses of diplomacy, but it’s hard to summarise this mess with neat code in a compact model.
Can’t upvote this enough.
Totally agree with the article.
Nowadays those companies are all about re-creating and reconfiguring the way people develop software so everyone will be hostage of their platforms. We see this in everything now Docker/DockerHub/Kubernetes and GitHub actions were the first sign of this cancer.
We now have a generation of developers that doesn’t understand the basic of their tech stack, about networking, about DNS, about how to deploy a simple thing into a server that doesn’t use some Docker BS or isn’t a 3rd party cloud xyz deploy-from-github service.
The “experts” who work in consulting companies are part of this as they usually don’t even know how to do things without the property solutions. Let me give you an example, once I had to work with E&Y, one of those big consulting companies, and I realized some awkward things while having conversations with both low level employees and partners / middle management, they weren’t aware that there are alternatives most of the time. A manager of a digital transformation and cloud solutions team that started his career E&Y, wasn’t aware that there was open-source alternatives to Google Workplace and Microsoft 365 for e-mail. I probed a TON around that and the guy, a software engineer with an university degree, didn’t even know that was Postfix was and the history of email.
Postfix wasn’t in my university degree, nor do I think it should be. It’s useful to know about SMTP but it’s like saying you need to know the history of brick manufacturing to be a material engineer.
Yeah sure, unless you’re propagating lies and shitting on everything and everyone that doesn’t fit/is your run of the mill proprietary solution that might give a bunch of $$ to your company at the expense of the customer ability to have a future.
This article really hit the spot. On the other hand, nowadays development is accessible to everyone and it’s really easy to learn development because of the ever growing amount of tools and frameworks. As a result, anybody can become a developer, maybe with superficial knowledge, but if you can make something work, you might be good enough for a company to hire you. However, as a software engineer, I am disappointed of this trend
