Developer inequality and the technical debt crisis

It's when I'm churning out ridiculous amounts of front-end kluge that I start over-engineering or introducing complexity and indirection where it's totally unnecessary.

This seems like a particularly cogent hypothesis for the web, where a majority of the programming is not very intellectually stimulating* but is simultaneously time-consuming and mentally taxing.

* IMO and in my experience, mileage may vary. And this isn't to say you don't need to be intelligent. But requiring mental energy != intellectually stimulating.

I find the latter often appreciate the place and purpose of types more clearly than the former, even if the former would benefit as well from having concise encodings of intent in the design and creation phase.

This bias is prevalent in dyn-lang/consulting-oriented communities, often because they are churning out projects and dumping them on their clients/employers.

I think it's just a utopian fantasy to think that if only the right hypercard-like tool could be created, then the cost of building quality software would go down.

Or at any rate, actually: Let's agree that the web is built on an enormous stack of kludges upon kludges. (These kludges are both in code frameworks that people use to build things on the web, and in the fundamental protocols of the web itself). The reason it is this way is, again, because by the time it is recognized what a problem this is, it would simply be too expensive to rebuild the web from scratch. We can't afford it.

To build this utopian hypercard-like stack which allow just anyone to build web things, and be so high-quality that it just worked without having to understand the things it's abstracted on top of, and to maintain it as web technology and desires continue to evolve, etc.... would be such an expensive undertaking, with such a high risk of failure, that it has no way to succeed in that fantasy of making the web all around cheaper.

We see posts like this come up here from time to time, written by non-programmers who have some kind of belief that programmers _like_ complexity, that programmers are _opposed_ to making things easy and simple. I totally don't see "modern programmer culture fetish[izing] complexity" -- rather, on HN, I think it's pretty clear that modern programmer culture fetishizes simplicity. It's just that simplicity is _hard_. (And people chasing simplicity often end up over-abstracting, and just winding up with an even worse form of complexity). Succesful software that is powerful and reliable and simple takes skill and it takes time. And skill and time cost money.

We've built an economy and a society that is entirely based on crappy software, because the economy could not bear the cost of as much quality software as we have crappy software, and the crappy software provides short-term efficiencies that make people money. (and i'm not talking about programmers,I'm talking about the 'domain' businesses which could not afford to run without software 'automation' anymore, even though it's all crappy)