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Comment by Tyr42 | Hacker News Reader

Wow. After living on the google tech island for a while, it's surprising how much of this people have tried to "solve". Need a message? Pass a protobuf. Want to log something? Got you covered. Files? What's a file? I only make rpc calls to some database server.

So I think there's definitely some truth to what he is saying. However I'm not sure if we can climb down from our local optimum long enough to all climb up there together. I think even at google where it's pretty restricted you still might have two ways to do some things (the deprecated way and the not yet ready way).

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>After living on the google tech island for a while, it's surprising how much of this people have tried to "solve"

You're missing the point of the article. Most people and organizations have written libraries and services that make common development tasks much easier when developing within their own software ecosystems. Google is just one of many.

The question this article is getting towards is solving those problems in a pattern that transcends individual implementations and the conceptual model becomes as ubiquitous as the filesystem hierarchy.

Dumping a "this works for $DAYJOB" solution onto the public by publishing a standard isn't the answer. If that worked, those problems would be solved and this article wouldn't exist.

Before it can become as ubiquitous as the filesystem, people need to be using it somewhere. And also talking about it.

It's reasonable to say that "google implements some of those ideas" counts as evidence for "those ideas are right", which is mostly what I wanted to say.

You make a good point by the way. I really think that next iteration of the OS paradigm will come from this angle. OS is becoming redundant anyway, in the age of cloud services (I don't think it will be desktop OS, just another OS for cloud). You are basically only interested in environment for your app, hardware abstraction is not that important, when whole filesystem is read only docker container anyway.

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