Programmer Humor

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[–] Davin@lemmy.world 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

It's been a long time. At some point people need to abandon this idea that all needs and wants must align exactly so that we can have only one standard. I understand the pull for it, but it's not realistic.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

At some point people need to abandon this idea that all needs and wants must align exactly so that we can have only one standard.

That's what we have extensions for.

But I don't think we're anywhere near your hypothetical state. On the contrary, my time in business has been dominated by designing and updating bespoke interfaces between bespoke systems. Everything is bespoke, at the industry level. Measurement tools are bespoke. Relational databases are bespoke. Transmission protocols are bespoke. Everything's a daisy chain of staging tables and APIs, as you get what is functionally interchangeable data from half a dozen different systems to tie out into the final accounting ledger.

Hell, we can't even get aligned to the metric system. Assholes are still running around talking about feet and gallons, until they cross a border and have to kick over to meters and liters.

I understand the pull for it, but it’s not realistic.

One of the most revolutionary ideas of the modern logistics system was the uniform shipping container. You had a pre-defined box size with well-established uniform characteristics that you could load up with whatever you pleased. Then you could load up a container in a factory, put it on a truck, take it to a train, move it onto a ship, sail it across the sea, unload it onto a train, that puts it on a truck, that takes it to a warehouse. And because everyone agreed to adhere to a single shipping container standard, the entire system of transit could be built to accommodate units of that size.

Not only is the idea realistic, it is essential to a modern efficient interoperable system.

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[–] Davin@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I've worked with getting shipping working with a few a different companies. I find it a little silly to try to use shipping as an example of a non bespoke system. They can't even agree whether to do HxWxD or HxDxW. They agreed on one thing, great, that doesn't do much for the systems.

I don't think it's necessary to completely unbespoke the systems, we've wasted decades and decades on trying that and only ended up creating more and more different standards.

I also don't think that everything needs needs to remain as disjointed and insanely different as it currently is. But whenever I hear a person say, "don't reinvent the wheel." They, so far, have always tended to lack the understanding of how things actually work in the real world.

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[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

I find it a little silly to try to use shipping as an example of a non bespoke system.

That's fine. Good luck with your bespoke-solution-to-everything. It does have the benefit of locking in clients and being very lucrative in the long run.

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[–] Davin@lemmy.world 1 point 1 year ago

That's one of the problems with you absolutist weirdos. I'm not locking anyone into anything, including any one of the many standards that you lot keep creating. Maybe the next one will finally be it. Hasn't worked for decades and decades, but maybe the next one will be it.