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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

Why are you conflating building architecture and software architecture. I'm pretty sure no software developer has every thought of their project in terms of "post-modern."

New Jersey style? The PERL style? I've never heard of "New Jersey style." Are you joking? I'm almost positive that Perl didn't influence openssl development at all.

"Modern is more old Stanford-style development." I think you've read way to much into this. And sorry citing the "The UNIX Hater's Handbook" doesn't do much for the credibility of your odd argument.

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New Jersey style is a reference to Richard Gabriel's "Worse is better" essay.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

[2] http://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

Perl is explicitly postmodern. Here's Larry Wall explaining it: http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

Look into "New Jersey vs. MIT" and "worse is better". The idea more or less is that AT&T (in Jersey) cared more about software that shipped whereas MIT cared about more about good design. MIT produced Lisp and Lisp machines, Bell Labs produced C and Unix. Who won?

The mainframes and OpenVMS (though its clone, Windows). They're produced closer to the MIT and cathedral styles with a practical focus. The mainframes still run the backends of our financial system, logistics, big retailers, and so on. Most stuff that people consume requires one of them. If a desktop is involved, it's usually Windows based with 90+% of the market share despite UNIX workstations and Linux desktops existing for a long time.

So, who won? Nobody. Both had success. Most successful, though, was combining a little bit of MIT method, cathedral, and ship fast from "worse is better." That's IBM and Microsoft's approach. A hybrid worthy of another Gabriel essay.

Thanks for the additional perspective there. I'll have to keep that in mind.

Sure thing. :) And here's the OpenVMS & Windows connection in case you weren't aware of it:

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re...

Bill robbing Apple of GUI is well-known. Less known is he stole a more robust and secure architecture from OpenVMS that was most rock-solid of OS's. They managed to show what would happen if OpenVMS had no QA process during development. Yet, recent efforts have gotten Windows Server reliable enough that the connection is more believable. :)

What about all of these Perl scripts generating assembly code for AES for every architecture under the sun? https://github.com/openssl/openssl/tree/master/crypto/aes/as...

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