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It's almost a bad dream that we used to have to manually declare and initialise our dependencies, and then wire them manually together in XML. But we just moved the complexity elsewhere.

Not too relevant in any case. I just found the comment amusing, reminded me of 2012-ish, when node dev complained of a framework explosion and an excess of complexity, when it was orders of magnitude simpler than the usual JEE suspects

1999 would be the 90s right? You’re probably referring to J2EE. By the time it was released Enterprise Java Beans among other RMI-based Java Enterprise solutions were there (and CORBA even earlier)

*me looking up how to open a file properly in {{some_language}}*

Note that the applications themselves largely haven’t gotten more sophisticated. 99% of apps are lists of stuff from a database with CRUD operations.

I feel increasingly like an old crank but I've been saying for decades that if you can't read and write the code in a text editor then it's too complex. I'll admit to a sliver of hyperbole, but I think it stands up practically too when taking into account abstractions that only leak in useful ways.

there's this part =)

... which puts things that matter, like f. e. architectural skills, deep into the background.

For me the tools had a sweet spot some years ago. The languages and frameworks I use haven't evolved that much, but got a bit more convenient. But in the same time the tools got worse, slowing me down, get indeterministic UI, so I really have to concentrate and be careful. Weird.