Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

This is a common pattern, when it come to semi-idealistic memes like microservices or agile. I think it's a bad idea to have such hairy, abstract ideas travel too far and wide.

They become a bucket of clichés and abstract terms. Clichéd descriptions of problems you're encountering, like deployments being hard. Clichéd descriptions of the solutions. This let's everyone in on the debate, whether they actually understand anything real to a useful degree or not. It's a lot easier to have opinions about something using agile or microservice standard terms, than using your own words. I've seen heated debates between people who would not be able to articulate any part of the debate without these clichés, they have no idea what they are actually debating.

For a case in point, if this article described architecture A, B & C without mentioning microservices, monoliths and their associated terms... (1) Far fewer people would have read it or had an opinion about it. (2) The people who do, will be the ones that actually had similar experiences and can relate or disagree in their own words/thoughts.

What makes these quasi-ideological in my view is how things are contrasted, generally dichotomously. Agile Vs Waterfall. Microservices Vs Monolithic Architecture. This mentally limits the field of possibilities, of thought.

So sure, it's very possible that architecture style is/was totally besides the point. Dropping the labels of microservices architecture frees you up to (1) think in your own terms and (2) focus on the problems themselves, not the clichéd abstract version of the problem.

Basically, microservice architecture can be great. Agile HR policies can be fine. Just... don't call them that, and don't read past the first few paragraphs.

Interesting perspective. I think that seeking and naming patterns "microservices", "agile", etc. is useful. It provides something like a domain specific language that allows a higher level conversation to take place.

The problem, as your identify, is that once a pattern has been identified people too easily line up behind it and denigrate the "contrasting" pattern. The abstraction becomes opaque. We're used to simplistic narratives of good vs evil, my team vs your team, etc. and our tendency to embrace these narratives leads to dumb pointless conversations driven more be ideology than any desire to find truth.

I agree that it's useful, I even think more people should do it more often. Creating your own language (and learning other people's) is a way of having deep thoughts, not just expressing. Words for patterns (or abstract ions generally) are a quanta of language.

I just think there can be downsides to them. These are theories as well as terms and they become parts of our worldview, even identity. This can engage our selective reasoning, cognitive biases and our "defend the worldview!" mechanisms in general. At some point, it's time for new words.

Glad people seem ok with this. I've expressed similar views before (perhaps overstating things) with fairly negative responses. I think part of it might be language nuance. The term "ideology" carries less baggage in Europe, where "idealist" is what politicians hope to be perceived as while "ideologue" is a common political insult statesside, meaning blinded and fanatic.

The issue is that it is rare and difficult to be able to synthesize all the changes happening in computing and to go deep. So a certain “Pop culture” of computing develops that is superficial and cliche’d. We see this in many serious subjects: pop psychology, pop history, pop science, pop economics, pop nutrition. Some of these are better quality than others if they have a strong academic backing, but even in areas such as economics we can’t get to basic consensus on fundamentals due to the politicization, difficulty of reproducible experiment, and widespread “popular” concepts out there that may be wrong.

Concepts like microservices synthesize a bunch of tradeoffs and patterns that have been worked on for decades. They’re boiled down to an architecture fad, but have applicability in many contexts if you understand them.

Similarly with Agile, it synthesizes a lot of what we know about planning under uncertainty, continuous learning, feedback, flow, etc. But it’s often repackaged into cliche tepid forms by charlatans to sell consulting deals or Scrum black belts.

Alan Kay called this one out in an old interview: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

“computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.

So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.”

Interesting take, pop X.

I will take issue with one thing though... Shakespeare's plays were for something like a television audience, the mass market. The cheap seats cost about as much as a pint or two of ale. A lot of the audience would have been the illiterate, manual labouring type. They watched the same plays as the classy aristocrats in their box seats. It was a wide audience.

Shakespeare's stories had scandal and swordfighting, to go along with the deeper themes.

A lot of the best stuff is like that. I reckon GRRM a great novelist, personally, with deep contribution to the art. Everyone loves game of thrones. It's a politically driven story with thoughtful bits about gender, and class and about society. But, its not stingy on tits and incest, dragons and duels.

The one caveat was that Shakespeare's audience were all city slickers, and that probably made them all worldlier than the average Englishman who lived in a rural hovel, spoke dialect and rarely left his village.

What is an elitist pursuit is not really Shakespeare, it's watching 450 year old plays.

Thank you for writing up a concise text about the actual problem. While reading the article I consistently felt bothered by the terminology thrown around but couldn't really pin point why.

We really like to think in silos, categorize everything to make them feel familiar and approachable. Which is useful, but sometimes we need to shake them off so we can actually see the problems.

I agree exactly. A concept like "agile" is a great way of organising your own thoughts. Inventing words and concepts is a powerful tool. But... we have to remember that we invented them. They aren't real. That's easier when you invented them yourself.

After a while... it's like the cliché about taxi drivers investing in startups... Sign it's time to get out. When people I know have no idea start talking about the awesomeness of some abstract methodology... I'm out.

[Taboo Your Words](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com