"Captured by the tools" . . I am stealing that one!
Whew, yeah, I stepped away from Gradle once I got the keys for our company's Jenkins instance. Jenkins was . . its own . . bag of rats . . but at least it was somewhat predictable.
"Captured by the tools". You've described big label tech comms software from the last fifteen - nay, twenty - years. A . . frickin ECOSYSTEM . . an entire industry that outspends content creation several times over . . a vast panoply of ten thousand page specifications and eye-wateringly-expensive tooling . . all for making . . DOCUMENTS. For making documents. WHY DOES THIS EXIST.
Actually, there's a reason. But it's not a functional reason or a technical reason; it's economics, culture, a whole maze of perverse incentives. Which is why it's so frustrating. I'm working on a presentation for exactly this, and it's been really cathartic.
Why should my build tool require more study than the language I’m working in? Why do I need to learn a wholly language to build?
In the same vein, why should the ORM be more complex than the database?
Why should the application server be orders of magnitude more complex than my code?
I mean - I do understand the reasons as given - I just don’t agree that the solutions are worth the sacrifices. I should not need a two week course to be good at some ancillary tool.
This morning I started thinking about this thread and what I use today. I don’t even notice the build and dependency system in Go. It’s just there, and it works. Easy things are easy, hard things are possible, and performance is important.
Whew, yeah, I stepped away from Gradle once I got the keys for our company's Jenkins instance. Jenkins was . . its own . . bag of rats . . but at least it was somewhat predictable.
"Captured by the tools". You've described big label tech comms software from the last fifteen - nay, twenty - years. A . . frickin ECOSYSTEM . . an entire industry that outspends content creation several times over . . a vast panoply of ten thousand page specifications and eye-wateringly-expensive tooling . . all for making . . DOCUMENTS. For making documents. WHY DOES THIS EXIST.
Actually, there's a reason. But it's not a functional reason or a technical reason; it's economics, culture, a whole maze of perverse incentives. Which is why it's so frustrating. I'm working on a presentation for exactly this, and it's been really cathartic.