Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?

Libraries outside those provided by the OS/compiler tended to be hard to come by. Certainly the universe of freely available library code that we have now was nonexistent (I’d argue that CPAN was a big factor in the spread of Perl in the 90s—well, that an the assumption that was widespread back then that CGI scripts had to be written in Perl).

As a community, we’ve collectively learned a lot of important lessons as well. Legacy systems like Perl and LaTeX tend to install common code in a single universal directory for everyone rather than having this be application/document specific as became the case with Java and the repositories will only give you the latest version of an artifact¹ which has tended to lead to stagnation since backwards compatibility becomes non-negotiable, although some lessons haven’t stuck (like the fact that Rust’s crates.io only has a single-level namespace for artifacts).

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1. Not sure if this is absolutely the case with CPAN. CTAN, which was quite possibly the first centralized repo² does not manage multiple versions of artifacts.

2. I remember when it was first being set up, since there was no guarantee that any tooling beyond TeX would be available to consumers, there being TeX scripts to do things like encode/decode binary files into emailable ASCII format. The original CTAN FTP server in the UK also had the remarkable feature that it would generate directory.zip for any directory that you requested.

Simple MVC stacks went to all languages, jQuery front-ends doing enough but not a lot. JavaScript enhanced easy to reason about server-side stacks.

You used to spend a couple of days a year, yes YEAR, mucking around with tooling. Now it wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say you spend a day or so a week fighting some part of your stack because it's been over-engineered.

IDEs can't keep up so you have to run inscrutable command line tools that fail if you have deviated even slightly from whatever error-prone rain-dance some moron claiming 'best practice' has forced into the build process.

Programming used to be about writing code to solve business problems. The shift to DevOps has been a massive productivity drain and most stacks are now incredibly brittle.

The worse part has been debugging, which you touch upon. Native calls, simple call stacks, easy error logging. All gone.

Moving everything into hard to debug http calls has been a disastrous productivity sink.

The irony has been that as languages have got significantly better our productivity has actually dropped massively because of the ridiculous amounts of over-engineering in "modern" code bases.

I recently worked on a project with 2 devs that took 3 months with a modern stack. The prototype in a standard MVC stack I'd made to demo to the client took 2 days.

It's utterly ridiculous and sometimes I feel like the boy in the story about the emperor with no clothes.

Furthermore, it's becoming more and more hype/marketing driven.

Solutions are adopted because they are popular or "cool". CV-driven development is becoming the norm.