Complexity Memes

The generational coding war in three frames. Junior dev with a broomstick getting roasted for using "ordinary functions and objects" and basic HTTP requests by some floating coding wizard. Then the mic drop: "My mentor said it was enough for projects of this era." Every senior dev has been that floating wizard, criticizing someone for not using the latest framework-du-jour or some unnecessarily complex architecture. Meanwhile, the junior with their simple CRUD app is actually shipping while we're busy bikeshedding about whether to use GraphQL or gRPC for a to-do list.

The bell curve of programming wisdom hits hard. The junior devs (IQ 55-70) and senior wizards (IQ 130-145) both preach simplicity, while the middle-management types with their "it has to have all the features!!" are trapped in complexity hell. After 15 years in this industry, I've watched countless projects collapse under their own weight because someone insisted on cramming in every possible feature. The truly enlightened know that elegance comes from ruthless simplification. Voltaire nailed it centuries ago, and we're still learning this lesson the hard way with every new framework, library, and enterprise application. The cycle is eternal: build it simple, complicate it needlessly, then spend years refactoring back to simplicity.

The eternal quest for software enlightenment ends with a splash of cold reality. After 15 years of searching, our intrepid developer discovers the sacred "Scroll of Truth" only to chuck it back into the abyss when faced with the uncomfortable revelation that "adding another layer of abstraction does not solve every problem." Somewhere, a senior architect is furiously drawing another UML diagram to prove this wrong while three new JavaScript frameworks were created during the time it took you to read this.

Nothing captures the duality of a developer's existence quite like this. When forced to code in a language you despise, you end up with a meticulously crafted monstrosity—technically functional but unnecessarily complex and painful to maintain. It's like building a Volvo out of LEGO bricks—sure, it looks like a car, but nobody wants to drive that thing. Meanwhile, coding in your preferred language is like that simple LEGO car below—elegant, efficient, and actually fun to build. The code practically writes itself! It might not be as flashy, but it gets the job done without making you question your career choices every 15 minutes. Funny how we'll spend 10 hours overengineering something in PHP when we could've knocked it out in Python before lunch. But hey, at least we have something to blame besides our own stubbornness!