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chubotHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

It is hard to find any kind of software that is not networked

… It is hard to find any kind of software that is not networked. As an example, in 2002 I worked at EA on shrink wrapped video games. They were completely offline embedded systems. But 2004 was the first year we added networking to the game, and now pretty much all games are networked in some way. Also, the Internet is the probably the biggest and most successful thing ever engineered ... (not sure what you would compare it to, maybe nuclear reactors or aircraft carriers). It would be surprising if there weren't some lessons to learn from its engineering!

Original discussionA Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture (2022)67 source comments · at import
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LO
loandbeholdHN

This guy just gave a cool name to an old concept.

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DjemanHN

Aircraft carriers and nuclear reactors are exactly not anything like internet. Huge physical engineering projects are like a huge jigsaw puzzle. Take one piece and picture is not complete. Internet is network, most physical thing to compare with is electric grid. But then again whole electric grid hums with one single frequency.

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SA
samatmanHN

I would compare Internet to the intermodal shipping container system, the international post, and not much else.

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EP
eprHN

> Are we all not glad we don’t use the Unix method of communicating on the web? Right? Any arbitrary command string can be the argument list for your program, and any arbitrary set of characters can come out the other end. Let’s all write parsers. - Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy

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