Data demand some damn respect
12 points by surprisetalk
12 points by surprisetalk
so, the author who is frustrated by too many compilation/transformation steps wants us to [checks notes] add more compilation/transformation steps? I genuinely don’t understand how any of this is a “simplifcation”, feels much more like an xkcd comic
This kind of feels like “CBOR/MessagePack should be the narrow waist of all computing” (i.e. the representation for all data and code)
– which I personally don’t think is a good idea, and also will almost certainly not happen
Some slogans from A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture
Is JSON the new narrow waist for shell?
It’s a narrow waist, but it’s not as universal as text or byte streams. For example, HTML and CSV are not the same as JSON, and they shouldn’t be.
Text Is The Only Thing You Can Agree On
Unix is equally inconvenient for every programmer [coming from many different languages w/ different data models], and that’s a good thing.
i.e. the point there is that
And from
The Internet Was Designed With a Narrow Waist
This economy of engineering is why Unix and the Internet have been so successful.
It’s also why programmers of all types lament the pervasiveness of text. I understand why: both #parsing and serialization are laborious, and have associated security problems. (String hygiene is still in the blog queue).
But I claim that programmers disregard system issues in favor of local convenience.
https://lobste.rs/s/vl9o4z/case_against_text_protocols#c_wsdhsm
The problem is: which structure? The lowest common denominator of structural formats doesn’t exist. In other words, the lowest common denominator is an unstructured byte stream.
And this is not an argument for the status quo – I liked this part of the top post right now:
https://lobste.rs/s/ment9k/xee_modern_xpath_xslt_engine_rust
Specification culture
I was at XML Prague, an XML conference, last year, and I noticed something interesting about XML culture. It is still very standards focused. This was a very prevalent attitude in the web development world in the early 2000s, but I think that although standards are still considered important today, they’re less culturally prominent.
The XML culture is different: stuff needs to be specified. If it’s not in a specification it’s not fully real. This makes the XML community move more slowly than the rest of the software community.
Basically, we have created a mess, and it is not a bad idea to slow down and take stock of it, and rationalize it
oh no please don’t call my janky compiler world class
LOL… but don’t tease, what’s your vision for scrapscript? It does seem like an ambitious project.