Excellent example clearly from a fellow soldier from the trenches!
As somebody who has built several instances of both payments- and travel booking systems, I have seen things in systems that "adhere to published schemas" (often because the schemas were beastly, design-by-committee hellscapes of extensibility) that defy belief.
While there is a strong argument to be made that strict type systems in programming langues like Haskell and Rust make it very difficult to play outside of the rules, this is unfortunately not the case in practice when it comes to APIs - both at present where you have a JSON Schema or Open API spec if you are lucky, and in the past (XML Schema, SOAP).
I wish that the ability to express a tight, fit-for-purpose schema or API actually resulted in this commonly being done. But look at the average API of any number of card payment gateways, hotels, or airlines, and you enter into a world where each integration with a new provider is a significant engineering undertaking to map the semantics - and the errors, oh the weird and wonderful errors... to the semantics of your system.
I am glad to work in the space-adjacent industry now, where things are ever so slightly better.
(Note the lack of sarcastic emphasis - it really is only _slightly_ better!)
As somebody who has built several instances of both payments- and travel booking systems, I have seen things in systems that "adhere to published schemas" (often because the schemas were beastly, design-by-committee hellscapes of extensibility) that defy belief.
While there is a strong argument to be made that strict type systems in programming langues like Haskell and Rust make it very difficult to play outside of the rules, this is unfortunately not the case in practice when it comes to APIs - both at present where you have a JSON Schema or Open API spec if you are lucky, and in the past (XML Schema, SOAP).
I wish that the ability to express a tight, fit-for-purpose schema or API actually resulted in this commonly being done. But look at the average API of any number of card payment gateways, hotels, or airlines, and you enter into a world where each integration with a new provider is a significant engineering undertaking to map the semantics - and the errors, oh the weird and wonderful errors... to the semantics of your system.
I am glad to work in the space-adjacent industry now, where things are ever so slightly better.
(Note the lack of sarcastic emphasis - it really is only _slightly_ better!)