Overengineering can kill your product

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  • Engineering within the wrong paradigm can kill your product.

    I see far more problems on a day-to-day basis with patterns and anti-patterns taken too far. For example, I never use the factory pattern, because it leads one down the Java road where everything ends up an object with mutable state. Which isn't scalable over some metric (like a million lines of code) because a human brain can't trace execution, even with a debugger. A far better pattern generally is to take a functional approach of accepting data, swizzling it, and returning the resulting data without mutability or side effects.

    Another really bad pattern is when execution suspends and resumes somewhere else (goto hell). Any project which uses queuing, eventual consistency, promises, nonblocking streams, even basic notifications or things as complex as monads will encounter this nondeterminism and inability to statically analyze code. Note that pretty much all web development suffers from some aspect of this due to its async and multi-signaling nature.

    So what I do now, which I don't see much these days, is solve problems abstractly in a spreadsheet (pure functional programming), in the shell (the Actor model) or as a flowchart (declarative and data-driven design), and then translate that to whatever crappy language/framework I have to use for the project. I find that today, roughly 90% of developer effort goes to discovery, refactoring and testing of ill-conceived code. Only 10% is "actual work" and that's probably a stretch.

    Which is incredibly heartbreaking for me to see, since I grew up on software like HyperCard, FileMaker and Microsoft Access which solved much of this in the 1980s and 90s in a no-code fashion. One of the very first "languages" I used was a visual programming environment called Visual Interactive Programming (VIP) for the Macintosh by Mainstay, which unfortunately today I can find almost nothing about, to show what an impact it had on computer science hah: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Visual+Interactive+Programming+VIP...

    With mainstream languages and frameworks like Node.js and React, and their predecessors like Ruby on Rails and Angular, I just keep thinking to myself "never have I seen so much code do so little". It's all overengineered man!

    Some better alternatives to the status quo:

    Simple Made Easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtk3HCgTa8

    Object-Oriented Programming is Bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM

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