[kscottz]

I don't think that is the intent of the article at all. I think the article is making a comment on building a single framework that can enable anyone to solve an arbitrary robotics problem. From the second paragraph, "The idea goes something like this: Programming robots is hard. And there are some people with really arcane skills and PhDs who are really expensive and seem to be required for some reason. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do robotics without them?"

There are host of companies, both extant and deceased, who attempted to do just that.

I don't think any ROS developer has ever made the claim that ROS makes building a robot "easy", "easier" yes, but "easy", certainly not. ROS is simply a collection of tools that people have built over the years to get their work done faster by not re-inventing the wheel. Many ROS packages have decades of real-world deployment behind them. Some ROS packages, like Nav2 and MoveIt, are incredibly helpful, other packages are difficult to use and poorly documented, just like in any open source ecosystem.

> Which in their quest to make robotics simple; made json a programming language

JSON, in ROS? I don't think that's how it works.

> massive ecosystem of abstracted complexity that breaks in undebuggable ways

If you have a solution for this I think you solved the problem of software engineering in general.

[joe_the_user]

I think the article is making a comment on building a single framework that can enable anyone to solve an arbitrary robotics problem.

The thing about that statement is it's mixing two different meanings of "framework". One thing framework means is a conventional library or API in a conventional programming language. The other thing framework means is a broad, conceptual that can be reused - in this case, in many robotics problems.

Using the first meaning of framework, sure, maybe it's not useful. But using the second meaning of framework, I think it's very useful to keep looking for such a thing and getting more people involved might help.