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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

There is a lot of glue code written because we are only transporting data through HTTP, that is the problem.

A concept that has been buzzing around my head a lot lately is, what if we could model objects/actors? So that I do not only go to google.com to display some HTML, but we have a standardised RPC language I can tell it to "search this query" and it returns a structured object? The same RPC I can use to talk to my Hue lamp and tell it "turn red."

In fact, our current HTML model can nicely map to a "render a thing to HTML" method call.

We spend too much time building complex systems by either scraping HTML, or gluing together incompatible APIs from vendors.

I want the Internet to be like the Erlang virtual machine. Each server is an independent actor that holds state, can send and receive messages, but they are not very trusted.

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> I want the Internet to be like the Erlang virtual machine. Each server is an independent actor that holds state, can send and receive messages, but they are not very trusted.

you sound quite a bit like Alan Kay there (and that's not a bad thing IMO).

I know, my extended idea is borne out of Alan Kay and his vision. It is very nebulous at this stage to expand further, but I do strongly agree with him now that "the computer revolution hasn't happened yet."

Are you trusted? The reason g-search and others don’t have an API is not a technical one. They won’t let you neither JSON nor HTML without captcha module injected into your browser because this is the way they earn money.

So? That can still be modelled in a RPC manner.

Instead of sending a "query <string>" command, I have to do:

    -> get-captcha
    <- returns a captcha object
    -> solve-captcha <id> <solution>
    <- returns a token string
    -> query <token> <string>
    <- returns a list of results

Very simplified. If HTTP is the transport, the current Authentication header is very good at encapsulating these details without having to repeat them every command.

Point is, HTTP is still too low level and we're paying people $150k a year to write glue code and reimplement API clients until they quit and do the same thing at another company.

Could work for the traditional image check, but not at all for the user behavior analysis magic they do. Which seems to take over.

I agree with you.

The problems that computers are trying to solve are partly the expression problem.

Given this state, do this calculation.

Object orientation for me means creating relationships between arbitrary groups of objects and sending messages between objects to do things.

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