The products we're building are more complex than they used to be, but I don't know if its true that backend development has inherently become more complex than it was in the past.

I've worked on everything from dinosaurs older than me to new greenfield projects using all the latest tech. I think over-complexity emerges in many ways, notably: too much abstraction, ignorance, dogma, and just straight up carelessness.

I think the abstraction problem is the most common and severe though. In enterprise software, I've spent an entire day in the past combing through several layers of services and repositories just to get the full picture of how a response object is being created for a single controller method.

Let me give another example: think about the great debate over ORM vs No-ORM. It's fundamentally a battle about the balances and costs of abstraction in software development. On one hand, you have a (hopefully) simple interface for defining a db's schema, but do I really want to obfuscate the developer from the implementation details of that `findBy` method and trust that the ORM will be 1) used correctly and 2) generate a performant, sensible query? What about security handling? Should I have my developers concerned about preventing potential SQL injections, or just let the ORM take care of that too? The answer depends on a lot of things.

Anyway, I believe for every abstraction:

- something significantly useful should be added (this seems like a truism as I write this, but i've seen a startling amount of useless abstractions)

- the cost should be carefully calculated

- understand where complexity is being added and subtracted

I believe thinking about abstraction in this way would've cut down a lot of the complexity I've seen in softwares past.

There's a lot of C out there homie

> even Stalin would tell you that you are making an error in politicizing technology.

Thank you, I loved this haha.

Vendor lock-in can be a real issue as you scale. I work at a company going through a hypergrowth phase, and we're more or less locked into Azure, which has been objectively awful for us

It's been a year since I touched an AWS lambda, but I'd bet money that cold starts are still an issue. There is a common hack that half works: have your function run every minute (you can use eventbridge rules for this); in the function handler, the first thing you should evaluate is whether or not it's a warming event or not, and exit 0 if it is. Your results may vary (mine did lol)

Cool

Actually, Pascal has slices

They are just so obscure, I forgot about them and no one uses them. No users, no problems

They are not part of the normal type system. You cannot declare a variable of a type slice. Nor a field. But when a parameter of a function is an (open) array, you can call the function with a slice of an existing array

That avoids most problems

The backing array exists when the function is called, and the function cannot store the slice, so the slice cannot outlive the array. It is like the function borrows the array. Only problem is if the function gets another reference to the array, through a global variable or something, and resizes it

That doesnt surprise me. They will let highly problematic security issues persist for weeks

Have any examples?

>signatures that are 3 lines long

What hath God wrought

I came here to say this. Literally every company ever does this. In marketing it's called a value-first proposition. I don't see it as evil by any means

Any miscers checking in?

this article was a blast for the past lol. I used to post there, i honestly doubt that most of misc even went to a gym. I stopped after I got into some political argument with some regular and he negged my account by 1000s and it ended up being pointless posting there, went to reddit for dumb offtopic stuff.

Was funny to see this come up on HN. I still love the Misc to this day. Changed my life

Admitting to being a miscer might put you on privately run HN blacklists.

Thats next level echochamber. Do people actually do this?

Yup, even custom css to help point out who you should downvote.

That's really interesting. Can you point to a github repo or chrome extension or something?

These groups tend to be invite only and don’t publicly post this code as it reveals usernames of people on blacklists, but if you search around discord channels or some subreddits you might find them.

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