Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by carapace 1618 days ago
First, let me confess that I don't have enough experience with ASN.1 or Protobufs to have an informed opinion.

The supporting argument for the "because it's there" hypothesis for why people reinvent things (in IT) is that they do it so often.

Even if all the newer message/serialization systems are better than ASN.1, they're not all better than each other, eh? Why so many? Same goes for chat systems, programming languages, etc.

1 comments

There has been a lot more new stuff in the world of programming languages, even recently, than there has been in the world of data schemata and encoding rules.

That said, most of the innovation in programming language theory has been around Haskell and related languages, and it has not justified languages like Golang or Python. DSLs in general are justified regardless of whether they are innovative in terms of programming language theory.