Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

This brings back the memories. Another true story to add to this one. I (like many Sun cohorts) loved the burritos at La Costeña market, and we had adopted the FAX trick from Adobe.

Then along came the "Distributed Objects Everywhere" project (which invented CORBA) and they wanted an example application so they created "BurritoTool" which used CORBA to find the server that was connected to the fax line, and a nice WYSIWYG window to select your burrito condiments. Everyone loved it, it was a great tool and we all used it.

Then one day we show up and they tell us they have turned off their fax machine. We asked why, and they show us faxes for burrito orders that started coming in at 6AM and went non-stop until they turned it off. Some seemed legit but many were clearly not from someone who knew the place.

We go back to the office and do some snooping and see a bunch of requests to the burrito server in the wee hours before anyone is at work. We trace the IP address to a hotel in New York city. We call the Hotel and as it turns out Sun Sales is hosting an event and one of the things they are showing off at the "pavilion" is our cool distributed object technology. And using Burritotool! But CORBA has done its job and when it hadn't been told there was a local burrito server it sent packets back to HQ and found the one in the systems group lab. Starting at 9AM eastern and going all morning long, people had been making random burrito orders as part of the demo code!

During my tenure at Sun the burrito tool faxed your order to Burrito Real (good, but not the institutions that La Costena and La Bamba were). Maybe this was in the wake of La Costena turning off their fax machine.

It was a dark day for Bay Area Burritos when they tore down the building that housed La Costena and La Bamba. There was some Burrito magic on that corner of Old Middlefield and Rengstorff.

As I recall, (it has been awhile!) it was "El Burrito Real" as a play on El Camino Real but yes, it was a loss. Fortunately we've still got Super Taqueria which makes a decent burrito, but I don't think they have any franchises up where you are :-).

I do think you're right that it was a play on that phrase, but there was no "El" in the name. From their website: "La Costena & Burrito Real" [1]

I was thinking of this place: https://www.yelp.com/biz/el-burrito-real-mountain-view

It was further down Rengstorff Ave.

Not to embark upon the most pointless internet debate in the world, but I'm absolutly certain that's a mistake. Note that there's another yelp listing for just "Burrito Real" at the same address, and the reviews of the one you link also refer to it as just "Burrito Real." And my gigantic belly from living a block off Rengstorff for years is my cite. :D

La Bamba, which had moved to Middlefield and Rengstorff, recently gave it up and went truck only. The truck parks in the O'Malley's Sports Pub lot on Old Middlefield.

they actually took over the O'Malley's kitchen. They are doing truck there as temporarily measure. The truck will continue with different menu once the kitchen is open.

La Costeña is now further down Middlefield in the shopping center at Whisman. They’re no longer a grocery store, more like a regular taqueria. They still make decent burritos and similar food.

At great prices too-- it's certainly one of the things I miss about living in mountain view.

A dark day indeed. My favourite was El Amigo Burrito in Santa Clara which is still going...

Burrito Real was actually same owners as La Costena. They just expanded the burrito operation into its own location. There was a period of overlap where they were both operating, but Burrito Real was significantly more convenient due to the size and the parking lot.

Our folks have always preferred Baji's Cafe and dare I say - Taco Bell for some reason. Never had the chance of eating at La Costeña.

This is both an awesome story and IMHO a great example of why "scalability" and "future-proof design" and object-oriented-everything-successfully-talks-to-all-the-stuff-that-hasn't-been-written-yet are not the be all end all.

My beef: the chances that someone setting up that demo would have gone "wait, hang on, where is this actually going?" would IMO have been significantly higher in a pragmatic/imperative/monolithic design context, because that detail would have been within the scope of consideration of the application itself. CORBA just makes that sort of thing disappear into... *gestures at everything and nothing*

The whole OOP notion of normalizing components and the connections between them is just a software encoding of bureaucracy meeting the human physiological response to Dunbar's number.

It's kinda sad that "let's build the perfect object-oriented communications system" can, when squinted at from the right angle, sometimes look like The One Last Thing We Will Ever Need To Do With A Computer To Build The Good Parts Of Skynet - all we get is (for want of a better word) institutionalization instead. And as the domain-specific semantic significance of discrete pieces of information are normalized^H"abstracted" away, it becomes extremely hard to regroup that significance into that mental place where we're able to subconsciously consider and weigh things up very effectively.

I wonder what the business equivalent to OOP is?

(NB. The intersection of programming language design and psychology is something I find incredibly interesting, so if you disagree with the my parent comment, can see glaring flaws in it, or have otherwise constructive criticism, I would very much like to know.)

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