
Ask HN: Least Overwhelming Field of Programming? - freetonik
Hi HN,<p>Part of my career is in web development. I&#x27;d love to pursue another field. But I am weary of overwhelmingness, accidental complexity, &quot;plumbing&quot; and tools.<p>I don&#x27;t want to keep spending my energy on connecting dozens of systems in 8 different languages and endless layers of abstraction just to launch a web app. I love the web, and I loved making web apps and websites, but today I rarely feel it&#x27;s worth the hassle.<p>What are the least overwhelming fields of programming?<p>Ones that:
- not as complex as the web
- are &quot;slow&quot; (as in, the opposite of ever-changing JS world) and mature
- more concerned with either end user problems (apps) or important fundamentals, but not the middle ground complex engineering problems (e.g. kernel development)
- maybe, closer to math and theoretical CS (because math is the dream of &quot;zero accidental complexity, pure problem domain&quot;)<p>Desktop app development? Quite overwhelming, it seems. macOS&#x2F;Swift maybe?<p>Mobile? Android, even with Kotlin, isn&#x27;t very nice (at least the last time I tried it). Not sure about iOS. Maybe, sandboxing and lots of limitations are rather good?<p>Microcontrollers? ML? Computer vision? Robots?<p>I appreciate any input.<p>Thank you.
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elcomet
I think you can do simple and powerful web programming without pursuing the
latest front-end or back-end frameworks. Just use jQuery and frameworks like
symfony or django, or others depending of your favorite language. Those are
mature technologies that have been there for years.

Mobile might be less complex if you stick with the default native language and
tools.

I'd say maybe embedded programming is the field where you have the least
plumbing, but is more complex on other matters (chip power and consumption).

I wouldn't recommend machine learning, computer vision, and certainly not
robotics, which is tedious to make it work.

~~~
freetonik
I'd say Symfony and Django are pretty complex still. I remember the "good old
days" of vanilla PHP and bad coding practices as the simplest, most free-
feeling web dev I knew.

>Mobile might be less complex if you stick with the default native language
and tools.

That's where I'm leaning so far.

------
smt88
Web often seems to me like the _least_ overwhelming field. There are so many
people doing it well that there are tools to make everything pretty easy. All
of my biggest problems are people/org problems.

Maybe your problem is that doing something professionally will always force
you to spend time on parts you find uninteresting?

I agree mobile is awful. You might find 2D game dev to be fun, if you hyper-
focus on a single platform.

~~~
freetonik
I think I know what you mean. In terms of the quantity of tools, people and
solutions it's hard to beat web.

>Maybe your problem is that doing something professionally will always force
you to spend time on parts you find uninteresting?

Maybe. But that's just part of the problem. The other part is breath-first
nature of work. In web, you have to cover a lot of different bases in order to
get things going. I imagine in mobile dev it's more of a depth-first nature.
There are _less_ things to think about.

>You might find 2D game dev to be fun, if you hyper-focus on a single
platform.

Thank you, I haven't even considered that. Quick look at the current state of
Unity and it seems like it could be interesting. I like to draw [1] and the
idea of drawing game art sounds appealing.

[1] [https://rakhim.org/honestly-undefined/](https://rakhim.org/honestly-
undefined/)

