> Curiously, while folks sometimes complain about breaking up a system into smaller microservices or smaller classes, nobody every complains about being asked to break up an essay into paragraphs.
There are orders of magnitude different amounts of work in each of these cases. (I’m not saying it’s a lot of work but it’s still significantly more in some of those cases relative to the others.)
Perhaps "break up your book into chapters" is a better metaphor for microservices. Breaking a chapter into paragraphs makes me think more of OO design or functional decomposition.
It’s breaking up into whole books. Each has is stored, distributed, addressed and built separately. You have to become an expert at making the implied overhead efficient, because it will dominate everything you do.
There are orders of magnitude different amounts of work in each of these cases. (I’m not saying it’s a lot of work but it’s still significantly more in some of those cases relative to the others.)