Are we overfitting our code to trends instead of problems?
3 fewbenefit 3 6/23/2025, 5:11:37 AM
I've been thinking modern programming feels increasingly shaped by ecosystem fashion. Frameworks change yearly, build tools get swapped like phone wallpapers, and even language choices feel driven more by vibe than need.
My concern is are we optimizing for what’s "new and exciting" rather than what’s appropriate and sustainable?
What are some signals that we’re solving tooling problems instead of real ones? Have we trained a generation of devs to chase abstractions instead of understanding fundamentals?
Curious what others think, is this a natural evolution of software... or are we just collectively procrastinating with better toys?
I've been in the Apple world for the last decade or so, but everything I've seen with SwiftUI feels like it's only been done to attract web developers who are used to React; the "magic" observables etc. seem to be just a bit unstable and a pain to debug when they do go wrong, but even when they're working as intended they still make it harder to work with than the old UIKit way of doing things, where manually observing changes to state could be as simple as a `didSet {}` block, or using NotificationCenter.
All that stuff about how SwiftUI is supposed to make it "simple" or "easy" to make a UI is nonsense: we had "simple" with Interface Builder. And with VisualBasic's cross-platform cousin, Xojo.
UIKit with didSet {} or NotificationCenter might be verbose, but at least you can see what’s going on. SwiftUI’s “magic” feels like trading simplicity for opacity.
And yeah, Interface Builder, VB, even Delphi gave visual control without hiding everything. Declarative UIs sound elegant until you need to trace why a view is re-rendering 7 times in a scroll.