They're not on to anything here. As further stated by your comment.

They work great when you have many teams working alongside each other within the same product.

It helps immensely with having consistent quality, structure, shared code, review practices, CI/CD....etc

The downside is that you essentially need an entire platform engineering team just to set up and maintain the monorepo, tooling, custom scripts, custom workflows....etc that support all the additional needs a monorepo and it's users have. Something that would never be a problem on a single repository like the list of pull requests maybe something that needs custom processes and workflows for in a monorepo due to the volume of changes.

(Ofc small mono repos don't require you to have a full team doing maintenance and platform engineering. But often you'll still find yourself dedicating an entire FTE worth of time towards it)

It's similar to microservices in that monorepo is a solution to scaling an organizational problem, not a solution to scaling a technology problem. It will create new problems that you have to solve that you would not have had to solve before. And that solution requires additional work to be effective and ergonomic. If those ergonomic and consistency issues aren't being solved then it will just devolve over time into a mess.

This is a weird take given that the majority of projects relevant to this article are massive projects with hundreds or thousands of developers working on them, over time periods that can measure in decades.

Pretending those don't exist and imagining fantasy scenarios where all large projects are made up of small modular pieces (while conveniently making no mention to all of the new problems this raises in practice).

Replace functions replace files and rewrite modules, that's expected and healthy for any project. This article is referring to the tendency for programmers to believe that an entire project should be scrapped and rewritten from scratch. Which seems to have nothing to do with your comment...?

I do feel like C# saw C++ and said "let's do that" in a way.

One of the biggest selling points about the language is the long-term and cross repo/product/company..etc consistency. Largely the language will be very recognizable regardless of where it's written and by who it's written due to well established conventions.

More and more ways to do the same thing but in slightly different ways is nice for the sake of choices but it's also making the language less consistent and portable.

While at the same time important language features like discriminated unions are still missing. Things that other languages have started to build features for by default. C# is incredibly "clunky" in comparison to say Typescript solely from a type system perspective. The .Net ecosystem of course more than makes up for any of this difference, but it's definitely not as enjoyable to work with the language itself.

The great thing about languages like C# is that you really don't need to "catch up". It's incredibly stable and what you know about C#8 (Really could get away with C# 6 or earlier) is more than enough to get you through the grand majority of personal and enterprise programming needs for the next 5-10 years.

New language versions are adding features, improving existing ones, and improving on the ergonomics. Not necessarily breaking or changing anything before it.

That's one of the major selling points really, stability and longevity. Without sacrificing performance, features, or innovation.

VS Code honestly kind of sucks for it, there's just so many small things missing or lacking.

Check out Rider, I was honestly surprised and switched over to it after 8 years of visual studio.

Yeah but the ecosystem drags it about as far down as you can go.

Backend development for large applications relies on stability, the JS ecosystem has anything except stability.This is okay for FE development where you naturally have a lot of churn.

It's a reasonable expectation that a backend built today should be maintenance free and stable over the next 5-10 years if no more features or bugfixes are required. And is buildable, as is, anywhere in that timeframe with minimal or zero additional work.

Additionally, strong backends in the same ecosystem are similar, they use similar technologies, similar configs, similar patterns, and similar conventions. This is not the case for JS/TS backends, there is incredible churn that hurts their long term stability and the low-maintenance requirements of strong enterprise, and even more importantly small businesses backends.

Mature ecosystems provide this by default this is why C#/Java is so popular for these long-standing, massive, enterprise systems. Because they are stable, they have well established conventions, and are consistent across codebases and enterprises.

This is a perspective most devs in the ecosystem lack, given that half of all developers have < 5 years of experience and the vast majority of that is weighted into the JS ecosystem. It takes working with systems written in python, TS, JS, C#, Java....etc to gain the critical insight necessary to evaluate what is actually important in backend development.

Edit: to be clear this isn't just shitting on JavaScript because that's what people do, I work with it everyday, TS is by far my favorite language. 2/3 of my career is with JS/TS. This is recognizing actual problems that are not singularly solvable with the ecosystem that pulls down its liability for backend development. There are languages and ecosystems are much better for your back end it's not that scary to learn a new language (many of my co-workers would disagree it's not scary 😒)

Pretty much.

For instance focusing on PR size. PR size may be a side effect of the maturity of the product, the type of work being performed, the complexity or lack thereof of the real world space their problems touch, and in the methodologies habits and practices of the team.

Just looking at PR size or really any other single dimensional KPI lead you to lose the nuance that was driving the productivity in the first place.

Honestly in my experience high productivity comes from a high level of unity in how the team thinks, approaches problems, and how diligent they are about their decisions. And isn't necessarily something that's strictly learned, it can be about getting the right people together.

That single line of code may be using a slow abstraction, doesn't cover edge cases, has no caching of reused values, has no optimization for the common path, or any other number of issues. Thus being slower, fragile, or sometimes not even solving the problem it's meant to solve.

More often than not performance and robustness comes at a significant increase to the amount of code you have to write in high level languages... Performance optimizations especially.

A high performance parser I was involved in writing was nearly 60x the amount of code (~12k LOC) of the lowest LOC solution you could make (~200LOC), but also several orders of magnitude faster. It also covered more edge cases, and could short circuit to more optimal paths during parsing, increasing the performance for common use cases which had optimized code written just for them.

More lines of code = slower

It doesn't. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of software engineering and is flawed in almost every way. To the point of it being an armchair statement. Often this is even objectively provable...

Isn't this an entire class of problems that's avoidable by using strict DDD-style entities?

You don't have the same "purists" OOP problems, you don't have extension methods to get lost in, you don't have publicly mutable state, and you have a clear surface area for state changes. And your ORM is happy.

Purists OOP has all sorts of issues, more procedural, pragmatic, approaches can alleviate that pain. And strict entities provide the same surface area as the functional approach, without concerns over breaking ORM tracking. With the added benefits of closely guarding local state.

Opinion time.

This is less "what you can't do in OOP" and more "what you can't do if you use OOP design as dogma" 🤔. Perhaps that's an important distinction to make, depending on your viewership, but to me this feels like a solution looking for a contrived problem.

Kind of sucks that the source is locked away...

Would be a lot more convenient to read it when I don't have the whereabouts to watch a video about it(env, data...etc).

Edit: Finally was able to get the whole thing to load, commented on my thoughts.

Yes, tons. But it depends on the team and the software. If I'm on a small and inexperienced team for example I'm going to be doing a lot of the work, if I'm on a small but competent team then I may be doing a lot more design & abstraction then the actual work.

Right now as a tech lead I would say ~40% of my time is actual programming.