[whatnow37373]

I realized the hype for composing $thing$s was overblown around 1993 when I learned I could just have "A Grand Unified $thing$" and almost immediately stopped using a dozen different $thing$s.

Then, a decade or two later, I realized the Grand Unified $thing$ was itself composed, but not by me so I had no control over it. Then I thought to myself, how great would it be if we decompose this Grand Unified $thing$ into many reusable $thing$s? That way we can be optimally productive by not being dependent on the idiosyncrasies of Grand Unified $thing$.

And so it was written and so it was done. We built many a $thing$ and the world was good, excellent even. But then one of the Ancients realized we could increase our productivity dramatically if we would compose our many $thing$s into one Grand Unified $thing$ so we wouldn't have to learn to use all these different $thing$s.

And so it was written and so it was done. Thus goes the story of the Ancients and their initiation of the most holy of cycles.

[eesmith]

I don't really get the joke. Given the context and timing, I'm guessing it's a Perl6/Raku commentary, with Larry Wall as the Ancient?

[whatnow37373]

There is a world outside of Perl. There really is.

It's a general observation of how we are infatuated with composibility, then tire of it and unify and then learn to love it again because the unifications grow stale and weird of which Perl is an excellent example.

[eesmith]

I switched to Python in 1998, and I haven't gone back to the Unix philosophy of decomposition into small command-line tools which interoperate via text and pipes, nor the COM/DCOM/CORBA approach, nor microservices, nor even Erlang processes, so I'm really not the target audience for your joke.

[whatnow37373]

Fair enough and sounds like a good career. I'm up to my elbow in microservices.

[DonHopkins]

I feel ya both! ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFiWEjCedzY