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Comment by old-gregg | Hacker News Reader

Programmers have always partitioned their code in, roughly, the following way:

   - lines
   - functions
   - objects
   - modules
   - binaries

The languages/terms differed, but that's how software has been constructed since approximately forever, and we've always had debates on optimal size/length of lines/functions/objects/modules, etc. We've also had numerous reincarnations of binaries talking to each other over some form of RPC. What happened here was a marketing knife-war between companies in the container management space. Then someone (we'll never remember who) tried to differentiate by coining this term, which basically means "binaries with RPC".

Every binary in your /usr/bin/ is a microservice. Just type `watch date` and enjoy two microservices running, no need for containers/kubernetes :)

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I have found that this applies all the way up to the loftiest levels of abstraction. For instance, we partition our problem space in terms of logical business process once you get to a certain altitude in the architecture. But, the most obvious way to represent these discrete process domains was with... objects. So yeah. It's objects all the way up. The only difference between good and bad code is how the developers handle namespacing, drawing abstraction hierarchies and modeling business facts.

Microservices are about organization, not about requests being sent on wires throughout some abomination of a cloud infrastructure. Developing a UserService class and having the audacity to just directly inject it into your application for usage is probably one of the most rebellious things you could do in 2020. Extra jail time if you also decide to use SQLite where appropriate.

Writing straight SQL will land you in a prison.

Things were so much easier 15 years ago. I see very little gain for all the complexity we have added since then. Ok we can scale easily on demand, but the vast majority of places won't need to.

Actually, we still can't scale easily on demand. Let's say you get 2x the traffic. Sure, your front-end instances in the cloud can scale to 2x the capacity, but that just moves the bottleneck over to your database.

And then you noticed that scaling an Amazon RDS database to a larger instance requires downtime...

> The only difference between good and bad code is how the developers handle namespacing, drawing abstraction hierarchies and modeling business facts.

I wish those were the only indicators of bad code, but illegible aesthetics, over-engineered complexity, under-engineered fragile modules, etc. are to be found everywhere.

I’d also add “not a shred of documentation” to the list. Not a comment, no issue- tracker IDs in the commit comments; just a confabulating pile of generically named “things doing things”.

Sometimes I’d rather go farming

Yes, programming keeps me straddling the line between futurism and going full luddite. Come on people, nobody is a mind reader, document your intentions in comments at the very least!

I don't think that definition of microservice is useful and I think it promoting it will add to the confusion around the issue. You can comment on the similarities in the way modern microservices and watch/date are architected without calling the latter microservices.

One additional level of granularity, above “lines”: tokens.

(Expressions mapping nicely to lines, ymmv).

Every couple of years Sun RPC/DCE gets re-invented, basically.

Exactly this. Well hype moves sales when people buy into that marketing crap.

Throw IT at wall, see what sticks.

You know what, http3 gonna be sick!

When you're all alone and feeling insane,

you know you lack the sweet sweet 2.0 Webscale.

As a non-native English speaker, I'm always puzzled by Americans rhyming. How does this work? And why does wormhole monocle not?

Only the first two lines rhyme.

It's supposed to make people think ahead.

But seems they just get angry instead.

Why oh why don't people just see,

the true meaning of rhyme, truth and the DDD.

This is the first poem I’ve read which mentions DDD.

I’ve definitely had enough internet for a while.

none of the lines rhyme.

Regarding "wormhole" and "monocle", they form a "slant rhyme" or "half rhyme": https://www.thefreedictionary.com/slant+rhyme

wormh_o_le mono_c_le

The although both words have the same last two letters - "le", the third last letters are different. This produces a different syllable when pronounced.

As a native English speaker, I have no idea what this person was trying to communicate :)

I like it not sure why buried. Guess rings too close to home for some.

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