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There's no "algebra" behind GraphQL. It's just a type system specification, with no behaviors. The equivalent would be the TypeScript type system. I don't bot

There's no "algebra" behind GraphQL. It's just a type system specification, with no behaviors. The equivalent would be the TypeScript type system. I don't bother debating GraphQL with folks anymore because I've learned the hard way there's a lot of misunderstanding. When people say "GraphQL" they usually mean some particular implementation of a GraphQL API they had a positive or negative experience with, not the idea as a whole. The specification as a concept is a bit hard to critique because it defines no implementation behavior. It's sort of like saying "REST API's are slow" or "REST API's that fetch nested relations produce bad SQL".

k__ 4y ago
GraphQL helped me to understand a very important fact. Even smart people don't understand stuff that is outside of their niche. And I mean Kernel-dev levels of smart. It's not that the tech they're critique is really bad, it's just not possible for them anymore to think outside their box.
- gavinray 4y ago
  > It's not that the tech they're critique is really bad I think marketing is somewhat to blame here. I work in the GraphQL space and there's not a lot of incentive to do neutral education. The goal is to get users to associate "GraphQL" with particular products/implementations. Half of my dayjob consists of explaining to others why $OTHERCOMPANY is not a competitor, because despite us both being GraphQL tools we do orthogonal things. Marketing doesn't help this. On top of this, GraphQL is (in my opinion) pretty complicated. It's not explainable in a sentence the way you can RESTful URLs, it takes a bit longer to grasp. Despite all of this, GraphQL is the best thing since sliced bread as far as I am concerned and I will continue building services in it until something better comes along.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    That "neutral education" is a good point. The same problems happened in the Object Management Group which standardizes a number of technologies such as UML and CORBA and applications of those technologies. (The map-vs-territory problem w/ UML has been addressed by various forms of "Executable UML" such as the Object Constraint Language which itself an algebra over UML-modeled objects) Look at the specs though and you find they are deliberately designed to be hard to implement. For instance there is the meta-object facility MOF which is great for modelling a set of objects in a language like Java. The point of MOF seems to be that you could bootstrap the whole UML edifice from a very simple foundation, and at the very least have a machine that can build a set of objects to represent both a collection of UML objects that function as a "schema" and also a collection of instance objects that are modeled by the schema. (This is a lot like the vision of the semantic web but going about it a very different way; in fact I am about to open source something that converts MOF models into RDF inside Python and also builds Python stub functions that let you 'call methods' on an RDF node while having access to the objects via SPARQL queries and other RDF tools.) If you actually try it however you find there are some inconsistencies, unresolved circularities, conflation of UML 1 and UML 2 concepts and other problems you run it. I'm certain that if I was "on fire" I could bend MOF enough to bootstrap UML-in-RDF in a month or two of working overtime. I've done that kind of thing before and that's just the start of your problem because then you have to market it... The result is that some incumbents have a "moat" but also that UML is out of the mainstream and addresses a much smaller market than it could.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I'd say GraphQL and Schema.org were both "asymmetric technologies" in the sense of asymmetric warfare but maybe the other way around. Both of them tackled some of the problem space the "semantic web" tackled (e.g. the linked data idea of do an http request and receive a graph) but in a way that privileged the large organizations that pushed them. With no semantics Facebook can return whatever they want from a GraphQL query, whatever is in the commercial interests. (I'd add that they have ethical constraints on top of that involving privacy, spam control, etc.) They have no real concern that anybody else can publish GraphQL and they are big enough that they can go it alone and be a defacto standard to interact with Facebook no matter how GraphQL fares in the real world. When schema.org came out my wheelhouse was information extraction from Wikipedia, Freebase, things like hat, and I was like... There is no 'reification of subjects' in schema.org, it's not really that much better from my perspective than extracting facts from text. In fact if anything it is more of a way for Google to get a training set for a real text extractor than a way to publish facts Google can use directly. So I was bearish on it initially but the standard really improved and technology got better both in terms of natural language processing and my understanding of matching engines that can 'reify subjects' by matching graph patterns. I don't see schema.org as difficult to consume now.
- safaci2000 4y ago
  to be fair, a kernel dev is so far down his rabbit hole that web services and web tech is not something that they're particularly interested in. They also know intricate details on what my kernel does that I have no hope of ever understand or desire to. They exceed at what they're passionate about.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    I'll say that many systems programmers are less effective at their jobs because they don't understand applications programming. You see it in frameworks like ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, etc.
    - k__ 4y ago
      Someone once said that Rust is so effective, because it the first big project built with it wasn't just a compiler.

k__ 4y ago

GraphQL helped me to understand a very important fact. Even smart people don't understand stuff that is outside of their niche. And I mean Kernel-dev levels of smart. It's not that the tech they're critique is really bad, it's just not possible for them anymore to think outside their box.

gavinray 4y ago
> It's not that the tech they're critique is really bad I think marketing is somewhat to blame here. I work in the GraphQL space and there's not a lot of incentive to do neutral education. The goal is to get users to associate "GraphQL" with particular products/implementations. Half of my dayjob consists of explaining to others why $OTHERCOMPANY is not a competitor, because despite us both being GraphQL tools we do orthogonal things. Marketing doesn't help this. On top of this, GraphQL is (in my opinion) pretty complicated. It's not explainable in a sentence the way you can RESTful URLs, it takes a bit longer to grasp. Despite all of this, GraphQL is the best thing since sliced bread as far as I am concerned and I will continue building services in it until something better comes along.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  That "neutral education" is a good point. The same problems happened in the Object Management Group which standardizes a number of technologies such as UML and CORBA and applications of those technologies. (The map-vs-territory problem w/ UML has been addressed by various forms of "Executable UML" such as the Object Constraint Language which itself an algebra over UML-modeled objects) Look at the specs though and you find they are deliberately designed to be hard to implement. For instance there is the meta-object facility MOF which is great for modelling a set of objects in a language like Java. The point of MOF seems to be that you could bootstrap the whole UML edifice from a very simple foundation, and at the very least have a machine that can build a set of objects to represent both a collection of UML objects that function as a "schema" and also a collection of instance objects that are modeled by the schema. (This is a lot like the vision of the semantic web but going about it a very different way; in fact I am about to open source something that converts MOF models into RDF inside Python and also builds Python stub functions that let you 'call methods' on an RDF node while having access to the objects via SPARQL queries and other RDF tools.) If you actually try it however you find there are some inconsistencies, unresolved circularities, conflation of UML 1 and UML 2 concepts and other problems you run it. I'm certain that if I was "on fire" I could bend MOF enough to bootstrap UML-in-RDF in a month or two of working overtime. I've done that kind of thing before and that's just the start of your problem because then you have to market it... The result is that some incumbents have a "moat" but also that UML is out of the mainstream and addresses a much smaller market than it could.
PaulHoule 4y ago
I'd say GraphQL and Schema.org were both "asymmetric technologies" in the sense of asymmetric warfare but maybe the other way around. Both of them tackled some of the problem space the "semantic web" tackled (e.g. the linked data idea of do an http request and receive a graph) but in a way that privileged the large organizations that pushed them. With no semantics Facebook can return whatever they want from a GraphQL query, whatever is in the commercial interests. (I'd add that they have ethical constraints on top of that involving privacy, spam control, etc.) They have no real concern that anybody else can publish GraphQL and they are big enough that they can go it alone and be a defacto standard to interact with Facebook no matter how GraphQL fares in the real world. When schema.org came out my wheelhouse was information extraction from Wikipedia, Freebase, things like hat, and I was like... There is no 'reification of subjects' in schema.org, it's not really that much better from my perspective than extracting facts from text. In fact if anything it is more of a way for Google to get a training set for a real text extractor than a way to publish facts Google can use directly. So I was bearish on it initially but the standard really improved and technology got better both in terms of natural language processing and my understanding of matching engines that can 'reify subjects' by matching graph patterns. I don't see schema.org as difficult to consume now.
safaci2000 4y ago
to be fair, a kernel dev is so far down his rabbit hole that web services and web tech is not something that they're particularly interested in. They also know intricate details on what my kernel does that I have no hope of ever understand or desire to. They exceed at what they're passionate about.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  I'll say that many systems programmers are less effective at their jobs because they don't understand applications programming. You see it in frameworks like ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, etc.
  - k__ 4y ago
    Someone once said that Rust is so effective, because it the first big project built with it wasn't just a compiler.