December 11, 2002. Lord Palmerston: "The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it." Programming has gotten too hard. [Joel on Software] [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]
I'm glad there are others around who think this. The other apposite phrase is "knowledge shock" (as in future shock, which probably has about 30,000,000 web references). His point about API surface areas is well made - it so happens only yesterday as I was remembering the first real GUI app I wrote (I had done some toy Lisa/Mac work years before) for the venerable Acorn RISC OS. RISC OS had a small, but very primitive API, one had to write one's own library to achieve the functionality of Window's 'RegisterClass' and 'WindowProc' and a whole bunch of other stuff; maddening, but one ended up with the API surface area you needed and you understood (and could fix), 'cos you had written it all yourself. I wouldn't like to go back to that, but the number of technologies there are now does lead to confusion and obfustication - do I solve this with this, that, the other, something else - and the constant fear that there's something else out there that's an even better solution. Working out what to use to solve the problem is probably harder than actually solving the problem.