Software Development Has Too Much Software in It

smustafa.blog

3 points·vipermark7··4 comments

Yep, we've built "stack" after "stack" out of collecting and manipulating rows of data and right now probably a thousand eager young developers are noodling on how to do it slightly differently, probably counting down the minutes till they can launch Slightly Different Stack on HN and maybe even Product Hunt if they're feeling really good about their slight differences!

This might have been worth something when we were "learning" and "evolving" what the web actually is as a platform for software, when we needed to attract ninja rockstars with standardized skillsets through our developer blogs, but it is probably entirely superfluous with AI.

I believe it. It does use too much software, and also too many layers of software.

However, it is not only that; too many other things (not only software programs, but also things such as 2FA, databases, cookies, Unicode, HTML, JSON, etc) are used in cases where they do not need to be used, or where something else would do better instead.

They mention React. I think GitHub uses React, although I wrote my own scripts to use instead and it is much shorter than theirs.

> They mention React.

For full transparency, I'm the one who wrote the article :)

I wasn't even thinking about 2FA when writing this, but that does raise a big accessibility issue for people who may struggle to use or wish to avoid smartphones. As someone observing the dumbphone trend with keen interest, it's a shame that US carriers are making it harder to stay with the older phones, since 2G and 3G connections are going away over time

A blog post about how the complexity of software development tooling is spiraling out of control. Enjoy! :D

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