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Comment by joepie91_ | Hacker News Reader

Was a reductio ad absurdum really necessary?

The significance of cognitive load in software development is well-understood, so it seems you're barking up to the wrong tree.

Yes, making things 'simpler' at the cost of architectural issues is bad - but that does not give you a wildcard to claim that complexity doesn't matter, as you seem to be doing right now.

A protocol like XMPP could easily use JSON without any significant architectural issues resulting from it.

Screaming "get off my lawn" to anybody who cares about developer efficiency, without any rational arguments underlying it, is not going to encourage them to use XMPP. It will just make them see you as a hostile dick that they don't want anything to do with. And that is not an insult - that is the reality of how people interpret these kind of posts.

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The most valuable thing XMPP gains from using XML is namespaces. The way namespaces have been defined to work on top of XML, is what allows the protocol to be distributely extensible. I.e. anyone can define new protocol without having to clear this with a centralized body, not even the XSF.

If you'd want this property in a JSON-based wire protocol, you'd invariably going to end up with XML-in-curly-brackets. This is why developing with/for XMPP is slightly harder than a protocol that has a limited feature scope.

However, as Dave mentions elsewhere, one shouldn't have to deal with the wire protocol directly to use XMPP in your application. A proper library should abstract from that. Arguably in some platforms, that's still a weak spot.

Was a reductio ad absurdum really necessary?

Yet there was none. Your very post, though, not only attempts to paint my comment as an "old person thing" (hilariously), it then attacks the speaker ("hostile dick"). Before you (incorrectly) start claiming fallacies, maybe commit to witholding them yourself.

My comment absolutely rises defensiveness among some people. But this is an endemic issue in this industry, and your personal feeling of diminished professionalism in the face of it needn't merit attack responses -- countless projects chose technologies not because they were efficient in any real world sense of that word (saving 15 minutes on the first day to pay thousands of hours later is hardly anyone's measure of "efficiency", and that you attempt to attack the very clear statement I made boggles the mind), but because they were the laziest, most accessible option available, saving a tiny amount of effort at the forefront.

Generating code is easy. Generating tonnes of code is easy. Generating good, well considered solutions, learning and adopting appropriate technologies and choices...well that's hard.

> Yet there was none.

There was. You were painting an overly ridiculous consequence of the argument, and then arguing against that overly-ridiculed consequence.

> Your very post, though, not only attempts to paint my comment as an "old person thing" (hilariously), it then attacks the speaker ("hostile dick").

As I explicitly pointed out, that wasn't an insult. It was a pointer as to how other people will likely interpret your comment. Which was more or less confirmed by the downvotes on it.

I wasn't attacking you. I was trying to make you understand how other people would read your comment.

The rest of your post again uses an overly ridiculous version of the argument to argue against (that really has nothing to do with my original statement), so there's really not much point in me responding to that.

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