The Grug Brained Developer

I'm sorry.

Now I'm right on the front lines of the business and it's eye opening. I think we need to take time to tech the domain to devs first. It's expensive and won't pay off unless the dev stays on the project for a while but it's the only way to allow the dev to understand what they're trying to do for the business.

In reflection I'm wondering if the problem is more that an external consultant is often not aligned with the business. Being directly employed helps with alignment.

grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem, factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too

That made me laugh. The microservices madness of the past decade is now starting to settle down to more mature understandings, but there are still a lot people biting off large testing, operational, and data transactionality/ reporting costs.

People often don't recognise beforehand the magnitude of extra complexity & associated productivity costs.

I've seen companies architecting 50 microservices with 50 separate datastores when they actually needed 5 midi services.. Then lose half their productivity trying to work with all this.

All that does is move somewhat messy language constructs into somewhat messy data constructs.

The data is static-ish, which is nice. But the associated code has exploded in complexity and with XML particularly you can't even be sure if it's truly compliant - especially if it's coming from an outside source.

So I think that whole talk is spectacularly missing the point. The idea is good but functional/read-only doesn't solve the problem.

Because some problems are just hard, and no amount of functional twiddling makes the hardness go away.

Names are hard. International localisation is hard. Dates and calendars are hard. International holidays and special dates are hard. Addresses are hard. Timezones and time systems are hard. Phone numbers are hard.

There is no trivial solution to any of these problems.

The most effective solution would be an international standard collection of algorithms and APIs baked into identical standard libraries for each mainstream language.

What you get instead is a lot of people wasting time and energy solving these problems over and over - badly.

And in fact XML, JSON, SQL, etc are similar. There are countless libraries and frameworks for managing these, and they're all slightly different and likely to fail in different ways - not just in different languages, but in multiple competing frameworks for the same language.

The problem isn't the code, it's the culture around it. Instead of solving a problem completely and standardising, the industry is addicted to nearly-but-not-quite solving the same problems over and over.

That's where a lot of unnecessary complexity comes from.