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I'm not sure "worse is better" is specifically an argument, but it seems to be a decent signal for survival and even broad market success. Like, if you don't n

by sk5t 6y ago

I'm not sure "worse is better" is specifically an argument, but it seems to be a decent signal for survival and even broad market success. Like, if you don't need the most compact and fastest possible serialization, isn't there some benefit in text / human-readable messages? There are lots of tools for dealing with text--searching, filtering, categorizing, and so on. It seems to me that most projects never get close to the point of real suffering due to inefficient serialization, or even due to mushy schema. Look at Javascript: a terrible language, but very broadly available, and sort of easy to pick up.

nsonha 6y ago
"most projects never get close to the point of real suffering due to inefficient serialization" Individual projects are fine and no you don't personally need efficient anything. But as an industry that serves a wide range of need (people from the 3rd world, embedded systems etc), we do have the need for things that become standards to be efficient, call that lowest common denominator. Why build efficient cars or batteries if we are currently fine with them? Why go for 5G when I can do everything just fine on 4G? Could it be because when inefficiency becomes standard it compounds? What if you can have 5G perceived speed right now if all Internet protocols were binary?