Having an intuition for the scope of a task, and for the likelihood of being able to complete it using existing components, is part of being a good programmer. His post would seem to imply that the only acceptable way to write big software is to stumble into it by accident.
It's not like there isn't close to a 3/4 million lines of code in JRuby.. Nothing quite like practicing what you're preaching. (The naive code count is something like 250,000 lines of java, 560,000 lines of ruby, 14,000 lines of yaml(?!) and about 2400 lines of xml. About have the ruby is in tests. I just piped 1.4rc1 through "wc -l")
It's almost like he's trying to prove the converse of his thesis. Not to be mean here, but he's a fairly junior level developer, he's a younger guy who done some things but not done that much. I've worked on some very large, highly profitable projects and we always knew use-cases and requirements long before we got in to the project. There are tools that allow not-great engineers to produce good stuff. There are also great engineers which are capable of dealing with the astronomic complexity of a large project and it turns out that people pay a lot more money for software that solves problems that they can't otherwise solve. If there is a simple solution that satisfies the requirements and beats the competition, then more power to you. Unfortunately, many complex problems have complex solutions.
