Ask HN: Is Accidental Complexity Growing Faster Than Essential Complexity?
I honestly don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s any worse than it has been before.  Back in my youth it was &quot;components&quot;.  If you can encapsulate functionality, then you should be able to compose it like tinker toys.  So let&#x27;s build these &quot;reusable&quot; components which act like black boxes.  We&#x27;ll nail up the API to the wall, and use some kind of versioning scheme to ensure that it&#x27;s always backwards compatible.  We can even build frameworks that standardise the communication between these black boxes and provide language agnostic object representations.  Hell, we can even build database interfaces around that concept and pass business domain objects back and forth directly.  And we can hide the complexity of the object-relation mapping in another framework.<p>Yeah, that will simplify <i>everything</i> :-).  It only looks shiny because the people doing it weren&#x27;t around in the 90&#x27;s to get sick of it the first time around.  Ah... who am I kidding?  4GLs have been around since the 70&#x27;s... :-P