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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

I was discussing about this with an old (60+) developer that still insists in making everything in PHP with his own CMS / framework that he built 10+ years ago.

He stated similar opinions to yours: "so many acronyms, frameworks, unnecessary features, etc". I don't know about you, but it sounded he was trying to cope with generational gap more than anything.

Nobody needs electrical powered car windows or even automatic transmission. Is it more complicated to build cars with those unnecessary features? Yes, but that's what the market expects.

Similarly, these days users expect all the bells and whistles of sophisticated user interfaces. They want to click a like button without having to refresh the whole window, and load content progressively without having to go to the next page.

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For this case your analogy is way-off this topic, you focused on age/old rather than what GraphQL cool offer... The correct analogy will be something like: Why do i need to lend a machine that only builts another machine on his own premises?

This is getting a bit philosophical for me, but here's my take:

Before starting Graphcool I was the tech person on various projects and low-tech startups. For each new project I would spin up a node server + db. After 2 years I saw myself managing 10 different installations, all with slightly different configurations, different approaches to api and authorisation etc.

Had Graphcool existed back then I would have had 10 separate projects that I could switch between in a beautiful ui, all fully managed and using the same api structure. Instead I find myself today partly responsible for the 4 remaining node installations that are the teams rely on, but don't have the expertise to manage in-house.

We live in a world where we pay people to do things that they can do better, or faster, or things that we just don't have time to do. The reason I go to the grocery store to buy my food is because I don't have the space or time to grow the food myself.

The reason I host on AWS is because I don't have the space, power, or time to set up machines locally and scale them as needed. And I definitely don't have time to manage them. What doesn't make sense about paying for additional levels of tooling? In many cases, the economy of scale actually makes it cheaper, not just convenient.

I once watched a show about a man who was obsessed with saving money. He saw some spilled uncooked rice on the ground, and sat there picking up the individual grains for probably about 20 minutes. He was extremely self-satisfied, and thought less of people who weren't able to be so financially responsible as him, not passing up a chance to get some "free" rice. Meanwhile, the task valued his time at probably 20 cents an hour.

We spoke about this at the office just the other day. Five years ago our small team would simply not have been able to build Graphcool. By utilising the latest technologies and outsourcing as many non-core areas as possible we have come incredibly far in just 1.5 years.

It makes perfect sense if you consider that the reason stuff like Graphcool and GraphQL exist is because the need of decoupling the front end stack. And the need to decouple it is because it's becoming increasingly complex.

> Why do i need to lend a machine that only builts another machine on his own premises?

You could just spend money/time to build the machine yourself. Right?

You are not understanding the problem and therefore you are shifting the POV from an IT problem to an economic problem. M going to use a more direct "example" from my POV: Imagine if JetBrains suddenly forces you to use their own "cloud platform" to host your own applications and projects? of course the IDE it's free and you can prototype everything for free, just need to paid for what you use, they got your back as longest you paid them to.

Well nobody is forcing you to do anything. If running your tech on your own infrastructure is better for you, then by all means keep on doing that.

> they got your back as longest you paid them to

Yeah, vendor lock-in is a problem, but depending on the size of your operation it might make sense.

With GraphQL based solutions it's less of a problem though.

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