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It seems to me that in every group of people where a certain concept is often used, that concept will get a short name. You are not going to write out many tim
by phicoh 5y ago
It seems to me that in every group of people where a certain concept is often used, that concept will get a short name.
You are not going to write out many times 'the chief engineer on a project'. So let's take a mostly unused term, like architect and stick with that. (Read 'The meaning Liff' where Douglas Adams is having fun with the reverse of this)
Same thing with RPC, you need to have a term for sending a message to a remote process asking it to execute a particular 'function' and send back the result.
At the same time, you don't want write a lot of code in each application to marshall arguments, send a message, wait for the reply, decode the result. So it seems obvious to generate those functions from a description file. And then you have something that looks a bit like a procedure call that is remote.
Of course at some point the discussion derails and people start claiming that the RPC is basis of distributed computing. And then other people start writing critiques.
That doesn't change the fact that a RPC is a nice concept, as long as you keep in mind what it really is, and what its limitations are.
- alephnan 5y ago> marshall arguments, send a message, wait for the reply, decode the result In the case of Protobuf, Google considers Protobuf as merely being focused on marshaling arguments then decoding results, and is otherwise decoupled from gRPC which is the layer and software to relay 1s and 0s.
- dekhn 5y agoNote that protobufs actually have a "service" section to define RPC endpoints: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto#services https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto#se...
- drewcoo 5y ago> in every group of people where a certain concept is often used, that concept will get a short name. His point is not name length, it's the inherent pompousness of the new names. We generally lack credentials. We puff up the terms for everything we do, making them seem important and official. What would Freud say?
- Thiez 5y agoIs a term like 'architect' pompous? What short, existing word would you use to describe who decides how something is going to be built? Is abbreviating "remote procedure call" to RPC pompous? I think the words 'graph' and 'topology' are about equally as likely to make normal peoples eyes glaze over.
- inkblotuniverse 5y agoSoftware Chief