[klabb3]

There should be a law for message passing systems, which says that everyone will eventually want ordered delivery, multiplexing (with priorities), exactly-once semantics, acknowledgements and backpressure. (Maybe more?)

I'm pretty convinced all these popular features could be layered in a reasonable way that could be implemented in most messaging systems, and have standardized semantics and conventions. It seems like every time, we're reinventing the wheel, and half the time people talk over one-another because we're using inexact language.

Basically, what I want is a "message passing a la carte" paper.

[Groxx]

"Every sufficiently-complex system eventually includes a badly-implemented email / lisp / kafka (/zmq/etc)"

Something like a combination of Greenspun's Tenth Rule[1] and Zawinski's Law[2]. Plus whatever would include your queueing system of choice.

Though honestly I've seen more bad queues than emails or lisps. By an order of magnitude or two.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski's_Law