There are software technologies that work really well in-the-small, but they don’t scale up well. The challenge here is that the problem size grows incrementally, and migrating off of them requires significant effort, and so locally it makes sense it to keep using them, but then you reach a point where you’re well into the size where they are a liability rather than an asset. Here are some examples.

Shell scripts are fantastic in the small: throughout my career, I’ve written hundreds and hundreds of bash scripts that are twenty lines are less, typically closer than to ten, frequently less than even five lines. But, as soon as I need to write an if statement, that’s a sign to me that I should probably write it in something like Python instead. Fortunately, I’ve rarely encountered large shell scripts in the wild these days, with DevStack being a notable exception.

I love using makefiles as simple task runners. In fact, I regularly use just, which is like an even simpler version of make, and has similar syntax. And I’ve seen makefiles used to good effect for building simple Go programs.

But there’s a reason technologies like Maven, Gradle, and Bazel emerged, and it’s because large-scale makefiles are an absolute nightmare. Someone even wrote a paper called Recursive Make Considered Harmful.

I’m not a YAML hater, I actually like it for configuration files that are reasonably sized, where “reasonably sized” means something like “30 lines or fewer”. I appreciate support for things like comments and not having to quote strings.

However, given how much of software operations runs on YAML these days, I’ve been burned too many times by having to edit very large YAML files. What’s human-readable in the small isn’t human-readable is the large.

The business world runs on spreadsheets: they are the biggest end-user programming success story in human history. Unfortunately, spreadsheets sometimes evolve into being de facto databases, which is terrifying. The leap required to move from using a spreadsheet as your system of record to a database is huge, which explains why this happens so often.

I’m a big fan of Markdown, but I’ve never tried to write an entire book with it. I’m going to outsource this example to Hillel Wayne, see his post Why I prefer rST to markdown: I will never stop dying on this hill.