Fabric not Uniforms

Too many decisions in the software industry are made, not by rigorous evaluation or personal experience, but instead by fads that a small, vocal minority tout.

These things aren’t typically as simple as the best sorting algorithm, or a recipe for hashing passwords¹ (maybe a bad example²), but are deeper than that–I’m talking about which programming language one should use, or which “framework,” or even which message broker or database.

Many times the question about whether the problem’s solution even requires a framework, or a message broker isn’t discussed. “Of course we need X, GitHub uses it!” Or “Node.js achieves 3,000 requests/s in NodeLover’s (pointless) benchmarks! Surely it’s the right tool for our factorial server!”

Please, make the herding stop!

Ian MacKaye once wrote two songs, “Straight Edge,” and “Out of Step,” and accidentally started the “straight edge” movement (or life-style, or a music scene–depending on who you talk to³. Both songs are biographical, but they were re-purposed to power other people’s agendas. Something in which he never intended. There’s a great metaphor that goes with it:

…if words or songs or lyrics are clothes, then really direct ideas become uniforms that anybody can put on. So some people can use the uniform to further their agenda and they don’t engage with it, they just put it on. And in my mind I thought being really direct would make it much more difficult for people to abuse the idea, but actually it’s easier to abuse because the ideas were finished and they didn’t have to contribute any of their own selves to the situation. -Ian MacKaye

In the software world there are “uniforms” too. Many of us choose to put on the Rails uniform, the NoSQL uniform, the Node.js uniform, or even the Agile uniforms. These tools and methodologies have movements, of course, with people actively recruiting for them at conferences, via blog posts, books and more. We, like fish, are attracted to “shiny buttons.”

Fabric, on the other hand is a foundational idea. It’s non-biased research, from industry, from academia, from individuals on blogs. It’s the type of talk at a conference which discusses concurrency primitives in a multitude of languages. Their pros. Their cons. It’s a paper about a new data structure which outlines its performance properties under different circumstances.

Uniforms hinder progress in our industry. The legions that uniforms create can’t see past their solutions–sort of analogous to “the blub paradox.”.

Uniforms don’t always fit⁴, and more often than not cause us to lose site of the original problem. Instead we focus on how we can use a belt and some thread to make the uniform fit our new problem, for no better reason than allegiance. This leads to security problems, bugs and bloated software, among other things. People too often tread water dressed as a Policeman.

We need to all become better tailors. And we certainly need to learn the art of fabric construction and selection. Only then will we be able to create our own properly fitting clothes.

- 2012/10/11 (Revised 2018/12/30)