First year anniversary of Minum version 8

It has been a year since the last major version change on Minum, so I wanted to provide an update.

I needed Minum to exist. Nothing else came close. I needed a framework that was the smallest, simplest, stablest, least-powerful, least-magical, and best-tested.

Most others touted their minimalism, but were comprised of tremendous quantities of code. Most others mentioned simplicity, but a quick inspection showed a labyrinth. Most frameworks relentlessly added new features.

When I started out as a new developer, we used Microsoft Web Forms. A charitable description might be that it made building web applications as straightforward as for desktop. However, there was hardly time between starting out and finding oneself in a quicksand of complexity. It soon became necessary to customize things beyond what the UI builder could provide.

Subsequent teams and technologies followed a similar track. Unnecessary complexity, in support of the notion of less-capable programmers. The strictures and magic of those frameworks hindered me. In fact, I found that most of my colleagues were indeed highly capable, but there is a ramp-up time on any new technology where some clumsy errors are made. Eventually though, that phase is left behind and the team develops sophistication.

Unfortunately, the system remained as it was designed, meant for unsophisticated developers. The pain it caused was particularly acute during the maintenance phase. At that point, the framework's apparatus, whose intent was ease of development, only obscured the data flow.

Popular tools often describe themselves along the lines of "making it easy to do complex things". This is not possible; our medium is complexity itself. While one technology might be simpler than another, that nuanced viewpoint gets short shrift. Our work will always be difficult, and never more than when attempting to fix a bug without adding a new one. Like Kernighan's Law:

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

The cure is to build with the least-powerful tools possible, in the least-clever way, even if that makes our initial work harder.

While every program has bugs, there are bright lights shining on every piece of Minum's code in the form of test and documentation. Additionally, there is a production system exercising every feature, which helps to highlight anything unexpected (particularly related to attacks)

Minum has remained stable in its major features and has not had breaking changes in a year. The intention is to stay that way for the future. There is no planned end-of-life for Minum version 8.