4 ms·

It there some sort of technical name for this phenomenon? Maybe like "pattern decay" or "technical decay"? From what I have observed in all throughout my career

It there some sort of technical name for this phenomenon? Maybe like "pattern decay" or "technical decay"? From what I have observed in all throughout my career this happens to every pattern eventually. People that come up with it obviously understand it themselves, but they have to serialize their understanding into some format like a conference talk or a book, which is inherently lossy as it's not an implementation, people in the wider community then deserialize the original understanding and (try) build an implementation out of it thus providing a myriad of serialized (but wrong) understandings out in the wild that are then encountered by subsequent waves of engineers who then take the pattern to have a new definition than the originally intended one.

drwiggly 5y ago
Its just cargo culting. A lot of programming advice/processes are fuzzy in a wider context. Generally they came to be in a specific context. Relating that context is hard. Eventually its picked up as a fad and spread around, just like a game of telephone we lose nuance and context. Pair this with imposter syndrome and low confidence, everyone tries to cover their ass and do what the current hype in the industry is doing. What if I suggested an architecture where every 5th call had the overhead of serialization and network time. Also the reliability and concern issues that go with multi machine calls. Data syncing issues and network partition concerns. Pretty sure most people couldn't reason about this system. They'd suggest instead of having network calls on every 5th call, lets really look at our use case and only insert them where we may have load issues and have to scale. Data state becomes a big concern, make sure we know where our data is at all times and is only passed when needed to be correct and not over pass it to be efficient.
- throwaway6532 5y ago
  Cargo culting. Of course. Derp! Why did that not immediately spring to mind???

drwiggly 5y ago

Its just cargo culting. A lot of programming advice/processes are fuzzy in a wider context. Generally they came to be in a specific context. Relating that context is hard. Eventually its picked up as a fad and spread around, just like a game of telephone we lose nuance and context. Pair this with imposter syndrome and low confidence, everyone tries to cover their ass and do what the current hype in the industry is doing. What if I suggested an architecture where every 5th call had the overhead of serialization and network time. Also the reliability and concern issues that go with multi machine calls. Data syncing issues and network partition concerns. Pretty sure most people couldn't reason about this system. They'd suggest instead of having network calls on every 5th call, lets really look at our use case and only insert them where we may have load issues and have to scale. Data state becomes a big concern, make sure we know where our data is at all times and is only passed when needed to be correct and not over pass it to be efficient.

throwaway6532 5y ago
Cargo culting. Of course. Derp! Why did that not immediately spring to mind???