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This reasonates with me. I enjoy the process of programming, even though my exposure to it has been relatively limited (a bit of dabbling in school, and an introductory class in college). But this year when I decided to really plunge into the technical side of things with some friends, I found that learning modern web technologies and actually building a Rails site was quite challenging, because it involved a host of things that all needed to be in place.

I went through HTML+CSS, jQuery, a bit of AngularJS, customising a few existing javascript packages we were using, then moved on to the backend: Linux, git, Rails, and a whole bunch of Rails gems which I had to read the documentation for and do a good bit of Googling on. There's been a lot of learning Rails and library APIs, finding workarounds for CSS quirks, googling combinations of terms to find out how to achieve something, and asking my experienced partner for help: most of this doesn't quite feel like core "programming". I'm happy when I don't have to wrestle with a totally unhelpful Rails error message for which Google has barely any results for (which I think turned out to be due to some inscrutable setting), or try to evaluate the architectural choices for modeling a set of multi-polymorphic relationships (where the blogposts present models with different capabilities and I don't know enough to tell what will really be useful in future).

Maybe I tried to bite off far more than I could chew, I don't know. I guess the trouble is that so much of web development relies on the use of prepackaged tools that the ramp-up learning curve is significantly more challenging than merely learning a single language's vocabulary. As a relative beginner (albeit with prior exposure to programming concepts), it look longer than I expected to get to my current point. Web development isn't just programming, it involves learning a new environment, a whole set of concepts and issues, and a toolbox that just grows and grows and grows...I've started storing my knowledge in a Freemind mindmap just to keep track of it all. I even save my IRC chatlogs whenever I manage to get advice. (If I had a more experienced partner to pair-program with, things would probably go a lot faster, but I'm mostly on my own.)

Now I'm looking at websocket libraries and other nodeJS frameworks like DerbyJS and Meteor for new functionality, and it's analysis paralysis all over again. It never ends for a beginner...I miss programming simple stuff.

> It never ends for a beginner...I miss programming simple stuff.

It never ends for a programmer. Constant learning and reinventing is what defines us. It gets easier to pick up new stuff, but you never end the process of picking up new stuff.

As ever, Simple Made Easy is apropos here: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy. It is well worth the hour, either watching it or downloading the MP3 and listening to it on your commute, jog, etc.

One point the speaker, Rich Hickey, argues is that we have a bad habit of focusing too much on our experience sitting at our desks ("look how quickly I can do this one thing") at the expense of complexity in the code.

It's a short view as opposed to a long view, since over time your project inevitably becomes larger and more complex. When you're trying to add a feature to a large, possibly mature product, you're seldom doing the same kind of work you see for a framework or language's demo code. Complexity will dominate everything else, to the point where it probably won't matter as much how easy it is to change the color on a div or whatever.

That said, if you can isolate complexity behind an API (not just hide it, but truly abstract it), it's probably better for your software. The problem is that software only seems to get more complex over time, and after a while your framework which ostensibly abstracts adds its own complexity, complexity incidental to the problem at hand.

Anywasy, I sympathize. :) As I see it, programming as we know it tends to involve gluing together frameworks and APIs more often than it does writing raw code. It's a huge stack of abstractions and I wonder at what point it's futile to try to understand more than a certain subset.

That said, some people like being able to write code which ships almost instantly ~everywhere, or to a great many tiny computers in people's pockets. It's not all bad, right? It could be simpler, but it just isn't, so the decision is to take it or leave it. (Or try to replace it, but now you have two problems and/or N+1 frameworks.)

> we continually add features in the name of "flexibility" until we have an unwieldy mess requiring HTML, CSS, Javascript, a framework, and various middleware pieces to make a site. We make a new library to abstract away the complexity, but the cycle repeats and that library is too complex, so a new library is created on top of it to simplify.

Well put.

That cycle of layering (abstraction, addition, complexity and then another layer of abstraction) has been going on since we invented the programmable computer. Machine language got us started but it was a bit on the hard side to put it mildly, so we came up with assembly language. That was fine on simple chips with little instruction sets, but then features were added and platforms multiplied, so we abstracted away the complexity with C. Then we started to solve problems for end users, so we added text- and graphics-mode libraries and the whole thing grew again. Then graphical OS's came along and suddenly object orientation and event handling made a lot of sense and we evolved various languages to do that, including C++. All built on the layer below and the layer below and so on; underneath it all we're directing electrons with little gates made from transistors.

The point is, everyone at any stage of the evolution of computer programming has wished for what you want: a simpler, more expressive language with less 'busy work' (for want of a better term.) Someone creates it, we're happy for a bit and we make amazing things with our new toys, then the pain starts again as the more visionary people among us (like your good self) start to think about what problems they could solve if only they didn't have so much dreadful housekeeping to do and all this stuff to wrangle.

Think about what your world - the web - is built on!

Underneath it all is transistors, and there are languages that add abstraction on top of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verilog

The tension between simplicity, abstraction, and just throwing it all away is fascinating and ever present.

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." - John von Neumann

“Any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple." - Albert Einstein.

As an avid HN reader, it's hard to avoid testing out the latest and greatest framework. Constant change does lead to complexity, so sometimes I have to foce myself to stay focused on whatever old and boring I'm working with for a current project.

I sometimes head over to project euler and solve some mathematical program in scheme just to realign myself with reality.