> I agree, which is why I want us to separate the baseline components from more powerful abstractions, leaving the former for the machine (the framework) and the latter for us. Does the limited scope of HTTP by itself mean we shouldn't be able to provide more semantically appropriate interfaces for services? The real issue is that those interfaces are hard to standardize, not that people don't make them.
We're likely in general agreement in terms of technical analysis. Let's focus on the concrete metric of 'economy' and hand-wavy metric of 'natural order'.
Re the latter, consider the thought that 'maybe the reason it is so difficult to standardize interfaces is because it is a false utopia?'
Re the former, the actual critical metric is 'is it more ecomical to create disposable and ad-hoc systems, or, to amortize the cost of a very "hard" task across 1 or 2 generations of software systems and workers?'
Now the industry voted with its wallets and blog propaganda of 'fresh engineers' with no skin in the component oriented approach in early '00s. That entire backlash that included "noSQL" movement was in fact, historically, a shift mainly motivated by economic considerations aided by a few black swans, like Linux and containarization. But now, the 'cost' of the complexity of assembly, deployment, and orchestration of a system based on that approach is causing information overload on the workers. And now we have generative AI, which seems to further tip the economic balance in favor of the late stage ad-hoc approach to putting a running system together.
As to why I used 'natural order'. The best "Lego like" system out there is organic chemistry. The (Alan) Kay vision of building code like nature builds organisms is of course hugely appealing. I arrived at the same notions independently when younger (post architecture school) but what I missed then and later realized is that the 'natural order' works because of the stupendous scales involved and the number of layers! Sure, maybe we can get software to be "organic" but it will naturally (pi) present the same perplexity to us as do biological systems. Do we actually fully understand how our bodies work?
We're likely in general agreement in terms of technical analysis. Let's focus on the concrete metric of 'economy' and hand-wavy metric of 'natural order'.
Re the latter, consider the thought that 'maybe the reason it is so difficult to standardize interfaces is because it is a false utopia?'
Re the former, the actual critical metric is 'is it more ecomical to create disposable and ad-hoc systems, or, to amortize the cost of a very "hard" task across 1 or 2 generations of software systems and workers?'
Now the industry voted with its wallets and blog propaganda of 'fresh engineers' with no skin in the component oriented approach in early '00s. That entire backlash that included "noSQL" movement was in fact, historically, a shift mainly motivated by economic considerations aided by a few black swans, like Linux and containarization. But now, the 'cost' of the complexity of assembly, deployment, and orchestration of a system based on that approach is causing information overload on the workers. And now we have generative AI, which seems to further tip the economic balance in favor of the late stage ad-hoc approach to putting a running system together.
As to why I used 'natural order'. The best "Lego like" system out there is organic chemistry. The (Alan) Kay vision of building code like nature builds organisms is of course hugely appealing. I arrived at the same notions independently when younger (post architecture school) but what I missed then and later realized is that the 'natural order' works because of the stupendous scales involved and the number of layers! Sure, maybe we can get software to be "organic" but it will naturally (pi) present the same perplexity to us as do biological systems. Do we actually fully understand how our bodies work?
(Just picking old professional scabs here)