All those tools you mention would fall under the accidental complexity header. There have been many advances in that field. But none of those tools reduce the essential complexity. SQL doesn’t mean you don’t have to think about how you organize your data. You still need to think about things like normalization. Even ORM doesn’t free you from this.
Same goes for debuggers, sure it’s easier to inspect code at runtime but that doesn’t help you design good code.
You can reduce this accidental complexity but in the end there is always the core of the essential complexity. The difference with past decades is that for a simple program the accidental complexity would be a huge part of the total complexity, so in that regard you’re right. It has become a lot easier to write trivial programs where the essential complexity is very low.
This may apply to a lot of hobby-level / beginner projects, but in the end it doesn’t have as much an impact on what we do as professionals. As you said, I spend a lot more time thinking about coding than actually writing code. Especially as I got older and more experienced. As a senior developer I write a fraction of the code I did as a junior, but I’m working on more complicated problems as well.
All those tools you mention would fall under the accidental complexity header. There have been many advances in that field. But none of those tools reduce the essential complexity. SQL doesn’t mean you don’t have to think about how you organize your data. You still need to think about things like normalization. Even ORM doesn’t free you from this.
Same goes for debuggers, sure it’s easier to inspect code at runtime but that doesn’t help you design good code.
You can reduce this accidental complexity but in the end there is always the core of the essential complexity. The difference with past decades is that for a simple program the accidental complexity would be a huge part of the total complexity, so in that regard you’re right. It has become a lot easier to write trivial programs where the essential complexity is very low.
This may apply to a lot of hobby-level / beginner projects, but in the end it doesn’t have as much an impact on what we do as professionals. As you said, I spend a lot more time thinking about coding than actually writing code. Especially as I got older and more experienced. As a senior developer I write a fraction of the code I did as a junior, but I’m working on more complicated problems as well.