I get where he’s coming from. I’m guessing everyone here has had a script they wrote for five people balloon into a multi-team project. People wonder why you, the original author, were so lazy with your architecture even though you thought it wasn’t going to survive more than a week.

The problem is that people aren’t willing to start over and rewrite software so you end up trying to bolt on features to an architecture that can’t handle them and the complexity becomes necessary for the software to function. C++ is the poster child for this, where the syntax for pure virtual functions is asinine but necessary because there was no other good way to do it at the time. If they had just rewritten C++ (and called it, I dunno, D for example) then they would avoid the complexity entirely.

I respect Ryan but he comes across as someone ignorant of the realities of real-world SWE.