The thing that annoys me about the failure of distributed objects as a programming paradigm is that,

in the 1990s, you could not go anywhere in computing without being utterly hammered by the message that Objects and especially Distributed Objects were The Future Here Now, this was it, Programming was Solved Forever, if you didn't Get It you were just Wrong

and we just sorta slid from there into "actually distributed objects are terrible never use them"

but never acknowledging that change.

It's not just the 1990s Distributed Objects people being so loud and aggressive and moneyed-up and preachy

It's not just that their tech was terrible and dangerous and caused billions in security damage

It's not just that the industry changed its mind about something it was so passionately furious scorched-earth in favour of

*It's the never admitting any fault* that gets me.

The computing industry often acts like an abusive gaslighting bully, and that behaviour is still going on today.

@natecull Maybe distributed objects solidified into hardware and became Internet of Things.

BTW, never use them if you can help it.

@natecull Not admitting failure & lack of retrospective and reflection are, I think, a symptom of industry (esp. VC culture) taking over the Computer Science field.

Academia should be trying to solve the massive security problems we face at the architectural level. Where is the basic research?

@tasket

Yep, "never admit liability" is definitely a Corporate thing not an Academic thing.

Though even in Academia, individual theorists are very unlikely now to ever admit wrongness because that's the end of their career if so and - just like startups - they're in bitter competition with many hungry peers looking for funding and prestige.

@natecull Its definitely down to the spread of corporate culture in academia. About 7 years ago there was some attention in the press (incl NYT) about research shifting to the private sector and basic research suffering as a result.

IIRC they traced the trend to the growing influence of silicon valley and VC culture.

Lack of integrity becomes a huge problem when learning from one's mistakes becomes unfashionable.

@natecull ML must be a natural outgrowth of this. There is a strong tendency to create software products that aren't really programs and which amplify bias and function like black boxes.

If one had to invent an anti-accountability scheme for IT, that would be it.

@tasket

Yes. But the thing is that "anti-accountability" is kind of seen as a positive good in the computing culture at the moment, due to techno-Libertarian roots.

The whole point of the Internet to some (as well as the whole point of Austrian/Objectivist economics), was to deliberately decouple the network from any possible human oversight.

Having removed human sentiment, whatever comes out of the meat grinder must be whatever survives, which must by definition be The Best Possible Thing.