CRUD and data serialization is an incredibly broad and diverse field. It's like saying "we've been moving our hands and feet for centuries, how can we not just say: this is how we move our hands and feet?"
Software has so many more possibilities to explore than carpentry which is constrained by our current physical technology. It's far better to encourage engineers to explore these diverse possibilities than to encourage conformity and allegiance to some singular path that everyone is supposed to agree on and work towards. You would simply miss a lot of different innovations by grinding away on the same path. Communities that do so just stagnate.
This is my way of thinking: 99.99999% of applications out there still will store their CRUD into a standard relational DB and run on standard operating system with standard protocols.
Sure you can create a lot of fuss all around it, but I feel we create a lot of fuss because of ego, because we want to be perceived that we came up with new ways.
The reason to not conform is ego. Software is perhaps the cheapest ego boosting tool ever created.
Good. The only people who come up with new ways are the people who have the ego to try, and the world is richer for it. I'm glad the world is filled with engineers who try and fail and learn instead of those who would rather not create a fuss.
I think developing new ways to do CRUD is great but as an industry we take it too far.
I worked at an agency that produced CRUD apps at a rate you wouldn't believe. Every task was correctly estimated to the nearest hour. Add xyz entity 2hrs, add xyz frontend widget 3hrs, change deployment pipeline 4hrs etc. This was possible because they picked a tech stack and stuck with it.
I've also worked at companies where doing the same task could be 2 or 3 days. A place where no task can be estimated smaller than 1 day. The reason being the infrastructure, deployment pipeline, tech stack etc is overcomplicated. Way too much overhead.
Unless you are building some massive scalable solution all you need for BE is Spring/Django/.Net and an SQL server with a single backend dev who knows his stuff. Frontend you might need to change frameworks more often but still you can go a solid 2-3 years building momentum before needing to switch.
- Basic ADO.NET (Not too different from JDBC/ODBC, direct commands)
- First Gen ORMs; Linq2Sql (functional but only on SQL server, and missing some features)
- Entity Framework (4-6) /NHibernate. Lots of people wound up hating this, so they went to
- Dapper. Dead simple; Takes SQL and only maps the results back. Everyone loves it.... Similar abstractions are created over Linq (linq2db, SqlFu) as well, with less (but happier) adoption.
- EF Core is released. Everyone switches back over again.
Yeah, all the churn costs more time and resources than it saves. I personally just stayed with Dapper, simple and flexible. I think people have a problem with judging tech based on any benefit rather than cost benefit analysis. People also value cuteness and elegance in doing 'common' tasks over conceptual simplicity and a similar degree of ugliness for all operations.
Yeah this is what I'm thinking. Yeah sometimes we need to figure out how "doors" work on the International Space Station, but 99.99999% of the time you buy a door kit from your hardware store and you're done. Same with serialization or CRUD or whatever, yeah maybe you do have really interesting requirements that are open research questions. But that's rare.
We're verging towards this, "No Code", PaaS, FaaS, Zapier, etc. I'd be super surprised if there were lots of CRUD jobs in the industry in 10 years.
Eh, yeah that's a fair point. I wonder if starting at one of those companies will be like walking into one of those houses built by an eccentric after a while though.
Probably more like a house built 100 years ago. I bought a made-to-measure blind for my flat a few weeks ago. Followed the instructions, went to attach it to my window frame only to find out that my window frame bows so much that the metal bar won't actually attach to the wall. Stuff like this is rampant in non-modern build housing, not just eccentric built.
In houses upkeep matters more than age. 2 out of 3 buildings I lived in are about a 100 years old (not present in map surveyed in 1914, present with right house numbers on map surveyed inbetween 1920 and 1924), and my current flat is in a 75y old building. Reinforced concrete skeleton, and the rest is brick. Best flats I ever lived in, the brick structure dampens the sounds well, and the high ceilings/tall windows let in a bunch of natural light.
Software has so many more possibilities to explore than carpentry which is constrained by our current physical technology. It's far better to encourage engineers to explore these diverse possibilities than to encourage conformity and allegiance to some singular path that everyone is supposed to agree on and work towards. You would simply miss a lot of different innovations by grinding away on the same path. Communities that do so just stagnate.