Comment by nisa

Interesting take and it feels familiar. I'm definitely in the "I need a tool to keep complexity under control" camp but I don't see it as a bad thing. Coming from a support and sysadmin/ops position seeing the same kind of problem every time makes you want to avoid the problem class. Of course it's often a fantasy. However I realized most problems I experienced were due to a general lack of understanding of the tools and concepts used. This was Java, Spring Framework, Aspect Oriented Programming and an ORM wrapper (MyBATIS) and 99% of my ops problems were due to the devs working around and against these concepts and tools with lots of bad code and so many NPE's that I still get nightmares. A skilled crew of veterans familiar with i.e. Spring, MyBATIS could have refactored this in a few months and most problems would be gone just using each tool how it was meant to be used. But we only added poorly understood layers upon poorly understood layers...

I understand everyone that goes into functional programming after realizing classes of problems don't exist there. I like guardrails. I learned to like immutable functional data structures after realizing 70% of time is Java serialization in the flame graph and I'd rather had the clojure way of solving these problems instead of the hidden magic. But properly learning all the mentioned tools and not abusing them would be enough.