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Have spent a few years during the late 90s/early 2000s in an industry running on ASN.1, coming from the web. I was initially surprised by how enamoured most of my coworkers were with ASN.1 and its tools, but it grew on me too: the pleasure of interacting only with a protocol specifications regardless of the implementation language/intricacies of the remote party, the guaranty that there could be no invalid messages received or emitted, the automatic generation of tests and tools, eventually balanced out the inconvenience of not being able to readily read data on the wire (it was before every human-readable protocols gets encrypted) and the inconvenience of not being able to start coding upfront. It was like going from runtime type checking to static type checking: initially inconvenient, but paying dividends after a short while. So why did this tech disappeared if it was ultimately better than the later alternatives (textual protocols, shema-less serializers, and eventually protobuf which reinstated some form of efficient encoding and type checking). As it uncannily frequently occurs with technological evolution, the reason is probably not to be found within its technical issues (which basically all boil down to: designed by committee). ASN.1 was just a bit too inconvenient, the free tools to generate code were just not quite good and robust enough, and the approach of starting with designing your types and protocols and putting in place your code production tool-chain before being able to ship anything was at odd with the mood of the day, which was to let the junior cheap dev fire off his code editor during the coffee break of the first design planning meeting to build the first half-backed prototype that would be already sold to the customer by the time he hits :wq. To move fast and break things, ASN.1 got in the way. So did formal specifications in general, code analyzing tools, even basic type checking, all of them thrown out the window during the same period for the extra weight, extra time-to-market and extra cost of hiring. Text protocols out competing saner alternatives because they are initially simpler (SIP vs H.323 anyone?), schema-less data formats predominating almost entirely because you can start hacking quicker, etc. are all attributable to that cultural rather than technical trend I believe. Now it seems the industry is slowly recovering from these excesses. Maybe because of the damage that has done, but more likely because of the end of cheap hardware progresses, encryption everywhere and massive data volumes (that's what made Google come up with better protocols than HTTP and better formats than human readable text, after all). |