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> 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 ince

> 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

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.