I like the analogy, but it strikes me as missing the upside (and other potential causes of problems the author may be seeing).

Bisquick is a great solution if you have only one problem. I want more solutions like Bisquick: easy to map to the problem (pancakes -> Bisquick; not pancakes -> not Bisquick), hard to fuck up, low marginal cost above the inputs. It's great!

In the converse, we have lots of custom software solutions which are exorbitantly costly over the long term. Small companies without in-house expertise have to figure out how they will maintain software they depend on when their consultant (or the boss's nephew) leaves. Big companies with significant workloads and workforces can afford (and indeed, profit from: https://danluu.com/in-house/) high-complexity custom engineering, which is...fine...but even FAANG have trouble figuring out how to incentivize system maintenance and support.

At heart, I believe we haven't come to grips with the extreme disparity in capital costs vs unit costs of software, such that we don't really know how to pay for the unpredictable costs of bitrot and maintenance. As a result, every software development project is ultimately a question of "how are you going to pay for its ongoing support".

I think you're speaking to a different (but still legit) problem. The OP is asking about the nature of confusing complexity, as it might appear to a new programmer. The capital implications of making real, profitable software from interlocking systems of alchemy is indeed not a solved problem - but I would say that it's interesting point of alignment between capitalists and beginner software programmers! Everyone wants lower maintenance costs, in terms of both time and brainpower. The $500k+ FAANG superstar programmer is a byproduct of the fact that alchemy is much harder to master than chemistry.

> Everyone wants lower maintenance costs, in terms of both time and brainpower. The $500k+ FAANG superstar programmer is a byproduct of the fact that alchemy is much harder to master than chemistry.

I think I've lost the analogy here a bit, could you help me? I thought "alchemy" were general purpose systems meant to get you off the ground.

I'm nominally one of these "$500k+ FAANG superstars" (though I'm not actually a superstar) and nearly all of our engineering time is spent wrangling home-grown abstractions built specifically for our business needs, which don't feel like "alchemy" in this analogy. Certainly a few teams are more involved with AWS services, linux, and dev-tooling but that constitutes maybe 5% of the company.

Would you still describe this other 95% as "alchemy"? If so, why?

I would say that you've paid the opportunity cost of learning the interlocking systems that compose into your application, and the processes required to update, test, and deploy it. This composition occurs across various boundaries, inside and outside the process, the network, and so on.

The FAANG-ist is one that can pay that opportunity cost quickly and completely, such that they are able to reason about the system with confidence, particularly when it comes time to reverse a feature or bug request into a set of commits. Or, more likely, a set of experiments and commits based on the outcome of those experiments. Given that there is no unified language of application design, doing this requires detailed, specific knowledge of every sub-system involved, the abstractions their authors used, and the ability to translate between them such that you can imagine the entire causal change from input to output. This is hard, and it's why you make the big bucks. (Interestingly, I first wrote "bugs" instead of "bucks". :)

I think I understand your perspective now, thank you for such a good explanation! Also, my bugs are indeed big /crying

This is a very helpful view on things. It definitely seems like evolution is taking place. Many of the new solutions are a mixture of other solutions with a certain aspect being the most important.

NextJs, Remix, RedwoodJs are all its own solution in adding what the creators feel are missing from React in terms of server side functionality.

Eventually there will be a clearer picture of which tool to use for various tasks like internal tools, eCommerce, B2B or cross platform applications.

The problem usually isn't the next layer of abstraction. NextJs and Remix are just fine (I don't have experience with RedwoodJs). The issue is that developers tend to put "Here be dragons!" in their mental map of whatever is two levels down the abstraction chain from where they live.

When those layers are small additions, people end up not understanding (or even fearing) components of their stack that are quite close to the surface. It's hard to do quality software engineering when you can't reason about the foundation of what you're building.

But if you lived through the process of adding new layers or if you take the time to learn more layers of your stack, you'll be able to make the most of the tradeoffs inherent to adding the latest framework or library.

They say the only two ways in business to make money are bundling and unbundling. This is surprisingly applicable to software frameworks as well.

> Plus all of these starting points imply the use of new languages, configurations, and programs, in particular, builds.

Oh yeah, true, some people keep saying a language is just a tool trying to convince somebody to use it, but they forget, or omit for some reason, the fact that it's not "just a tool", it's a huge ecosystem that brings additional, enormous mental burden with it - build system(s), libraries popular within that specific ecosystem, language syntax, language quirks, project structure, its own conventions and so forth.

It's much simpler and more efficient (technically and labour market-wise) to write everything in a single language, as much as possible - unless you start going completely against the grain. Like, auxilliary scripts are usually written in cli-centric languages like Bash, as opposed to API-centric like Python, because you get maximum convenience using cli programs and composing them together.

But no, some people casually shoot themselves in the foot by jumping from language to language depending on the task because it's "just a tool". Ripgrep is a just tool. An entire programming language with its ecosystem is not.

As someone who grew up in a house that was never without a box of Bisquick in the cupboard, that phrase speaks to me.