Re: REST impact paper
"J. Andrew Rogers" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.people.rohit-khare |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
> On Sep 8, 2017, at 1:46 PM, Stephen D. Williams <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 9/8/17 11:56 AM, Gregory Alan Bolcer wrote: >> No, they are techniques to increase the chance of reuse, but not necessary and sufficient criteria to guarantee. > > I might call them meta software patterns: What should the meta goals be and how should a result feel. They didn't anticipate the web and a zillion other things, but they saw that you could factor things for maximum reusability. Some of the things they created took the concept of a reusable function or library up a level or two into composable programs and services. And Unix as a whole was as flexible as they could make it. That spilled over into the design of protocols and services on the Internet. The history of the Internet and much software is many things being reused that probably never should have been, except perhaps as a dodgy short-lived one-off. Most of the reuse that happened was laziness, not any kind of thoughtful design. The craptastic mess that is the modern web ecosystem or mountain of hyper-modular mediocrity that is open source data stacks is the product of profligate reuse without any investment in design for reusability except at the level of “quick and dirty”. An ecosystem designed for reuse would have far higher architectural standards than is commonly seen in practice. A reasonable argument could be made that it is not worth the effort, as evidenced by the lack of people writing such software. It isn’t just writing reusable code but using it as well. High-quality reusability puts far more onus on the programmer code to semi-formally specify the behavioral details at the interface, which is real work that you don’t have to do with quick-n-dirty. _______________________________________________ FoRK mailing list http://xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork