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Just a random example, from this very forum, from Kenton Varda, who at one time maintained Protobuf at Google. "Nah, you're assuming too much. Protobuf was thr
by olvy0 4y ago
Just a random example, from this very forum, from Kenton Varda, who at one time maintained Protobuf at Google.
"Nah, you're assuming too much. Protobuf was thrown together in a fairly ad hoc way by a couple (brilliant!) engineers (Jeff and Sanjay) to help make the Google search index protocol easier to maintain. The specific design decisions in Protobuf were not carefully tested or weighed against other possibilities. They just did something that worked well enough, and it worked well enough that it was rapidly adopted by the rest of the company. It was then too late to change anything." [0]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25586995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25586995
- andyjohnson0 4y ago> They just did something that worked well enough, and it worked well enough that it was rapidly adopted by the rest of the company. It was then too late to change anything. Similar story with the decision to utilise tab characters in makefiles: "Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)#Rules https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_(software)#Rules