This proves that conventional wisdom (such as the idea that abstracting distributed computation is unworkable) is often wrong.
What happens is enough people try to do something and can't quite get it to work quite right that it eventually becomes assumed that anyone trying that approach is naive. Then people actively avoid trying because they don't want others to think they don't know "best practices".
Remember the post from the other day about magnetic amplifiers? Engineers in the US gave up on them. But for the Russians, mag amps never became "unworkable" and uncool to try, and they eventually solved the hard problems and made them extremely useful.
Technology is much more about trends and psychology than people realize. In some ways, so is the whole world. It seems to me that at some level, most humans never _really_ progress beyond middle-school level.
The starting point for analyzing most things should probably be from the context of teenage primates.
What happens is enough people try to do something and can't quite get it to work quite right that it eventually becomes assumed that anyone trying that approach is naive. Then people actively avoid trying because they don't want others to think they don't know "best practices".
Remember the post from the other day about magnetic amplifiers? Engineers in the US gave up on them. But for the Russians, mag amps never became "unworkable" and uncool to try, and they eventually solved the hard problems and made them extremely useful.
Technology is much more about trends and psychology than people realize. In some ways, so is the whole world. It seems to me that at some level, most humans never _really_ progress beyond middle-school level.
The starting point for analyzing most things should probably be from the context of teenage primates.