Comment by thatsit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thatsit | Hacker News Reader

Oh well, it’s not just about microservices… The whole damm IT/software world is just like that. Very few well-defined things, very few good standards, very few agreed upon architectures.

From an electrical engineering background, it is mind-boggling to me how we got to this convoluted software world. It’s like having different electric sockets in the same building. The only hard standards seem to be IP and HTTP.

I just have two basic explanations for that: 1. Most software today has no relationship to physics or the hardware it is running on. Hence, there is no need for optimization. 2. In new projects you always start from scratch and there are few guidelines/truths/principles to hold the developer accountable to. And if there are, then you can always discuss their applicability to your problem.

From a Computer Engineering background, it's just as convoluted when you start talking about hardware design. There's a reason every 2 generations Intel ends up rearranging their socket, and it's not all just because they want you to buy new CPUs. It's because all the sudden this section of the CPU needs more power and the previous pin wasn't enough.

The reason things shift for software is because they can and because there's no 1 "right" solution to almost any problem. There's no 1 correct way to represent data. And when we've tried to do that in the past (see SOAP) it ends up in a wild spaghetti mess of standards that tend to hamper development rather than speed it up.

There's also the very real problem that users of software LOVE to work around standards to the point where they create their own standards that ultimately end up needing to be supported in software. I can't tell you the number of times a "description" field in some set of data has ultimately ended up needing special handling in our data normalization process because an end user has decided "When I mark foo with this, it's actually a bar and the system needs to handle it slightly differently". To which our POs are happy to oblige. Often because software we didn't write is what the users are interacting with to send us data and the "description" field is the only thing they have the power to change.

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