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by tluyben2 1555 days ago
It's great you do this really. More ideas on how to actually get to LEGO (promised in software for a long, long time) like development. But yeah, even more than languages, I would think you need a massive following to get traction. Happy the community likes it!
1 comments

> More ideas on how to actually get to LEGO (promised in software for a long, long time)

I think for this reason the Lego analogy needs to be completely abandoned. Every effort of software modularization has been analogized to Lego at some point, and yet they all fall short. No arhicture claims they are the equivalent of twine glue and toothpicks, even if that's what it ends up being. So any N+1 language/framework/architecture promising it's going to be Lego (for reals this time), even if it does actually deliver, will not be taken seriously when they make the claim.

Well, good ABI/API’s and, let me really clearly separate this from the word ‘good’, standard OS GUI frameworks like Windows wpf and Mac OS X cacao for frontends is as far Lego as I have seen for now. Web frontends is where it all goes terribly wrong; nothing fits and everything breaks when you put X into Y when X and Y are from other authors generally. It is a shit show. But for backends and internally it can be done with good APIs. Problem is… not many people can write those, so you end up with something that says lego on the pack but is in fact lego after your ‘always was a bit weird’ cousin played with it with his flamethrower.
Polylith targets the backend, so I will concentrate my answer around that. I agree that good APIs are important. Polylith helps you with sharing code because it's built around "movable"/decoupled bricks that can be reused across services (e.g. different kinds of APIs). Reuse is a hard problem to solve, and you need LEGO-like building blocks for that.