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The problem isn't the programmers, it's the specs. Most specs are terribly written, and are hundreds or thousands of pages longer than they need to be.

Go read the latest USB Power Delivery spec. Or the BLE spec. Or the HEVC/H.265 spec. You will very quickly want to claw your eyes out.

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There's usually reasons for the specs looking like they do. The reasons are the same that make that beautiful pure 4 line function 150 lines after being battle tested in different environments and on different platforms for a few years.

I'm not perfectly familiar with power delivery or BLE, but from my experience with USB they could have just flat out omitted large parts of the spec from USB 1.0 and it wouldn't break a single use case.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if several hundred pages were added - and several million man hours wated - solely to shut up stakeholders.

I've read the USB PD spec. What's wrong with it? It seems ok to me compared to other specs. And yeah it's long, but different sections are for different people with different roles.

In my anecdotal experience, the problem is that many programmers just don't like working to a spec.

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