It's All So Simple (or YAFDSL/YAFSML)

I think that part of my problem with "modern IT" is the proliferation of "simplifying" technologies. Yeah, by itself, any given simplifying technology can be a boon. However, when you're in a position where you work with multiple, not highly-related tools, instead of having to learn one, complicated technology, you wind up having to learn multiple simplified technologies. So, now, you have to keep straight all these freaking "dialects" of simplified technologies. You have to  remember where they overlap with each other (and the parent technology they're simplifying), where they differ, their individual shortcomings — both in general and in relative to the technologies they're simplifying — and idiosyncrasies. Further complicating things is that all of these simplifying technologies tend to be rapidly evolving ...often so that they're essentially re-implementing the things they were designed to simplify away. It all becomes especially problematic when your position requires you to rapidly switch from one such simplifying technology to another.

Seriously: how many simplified markup languages do I need to know. How many flavors/reimplementations of those SMLs do I need to know. And it's not just text-formatting implementations, it's all the goddamned domain-specific languages (great, you're both pythonic and you both offer escapes to the underlying python, but you both use slightly different syntaxes and escaping to get to the underlying python).

When I came back from PTO, I found in my task list "re-do this automation in the automation framework's (Jenkins) native job-control language." All I could think was, "great, yet another fucking DSL to learn and keep straight from all the others."

Even that last thought reminds me of the first time I encountered YACC: "what's that," I asked. "Yet another compiler-compiler".

It's not even all that new a problem. When I first started dealing with text-formatting tools, SGML was the big thing. HTML was designed to provide a simpler method that was sorta inspired by SGML. And, over time, as each revision came out, we got things like CSS and XHTML which, essentially, bolted a lot of SGML's complexities and learning-curves back onto HTML. There was also the fun of learning TeX and then LaTeX (both really great when you wanted to create device-independent — "write it once" — document-rendering ...something that the proliferation of markup and simplified markup languages isn't helping).

Bah!