Yes, the field is littered with imperfection. One thing though - if you do take the time to learn the original "perfect" versions of these things, it helps you

Yes, the field is littered with imperfection. One thing though - if you do take the time to learn the original "perfect" versions of these things, it helps you become a much better system designer. I'm constantly worried about API design because it has such large and hard-to-change consequences. On the other hand, we as an industry have also succeeded quite a bit! So many of our abstractions work really well.