types that may make complete sense in your program's world, but they drift out of sync as the larger system evolves.
At the risk of being inflammatory, I would say that you've been looking at poorly designed systems.
A running joke about Google engineers is that all they do is shuffle data from one ProtoBuf to another. It's largely true. The upshot of that is that every single service/system has common, typed definitions of the data structures they use and require. Data never drifts out of sync.
To be sure, a lot of the problems I dealt with there were around data structure migration on large systems — but there was never any uncertainty about the structure of the data itself.
I like JSON APIs, but I think JSON especially contributes to people getting hand-wavy and casual about the structure of data across systems in stupid ways (see NoSQL vs SQL).
I don't think that's inflammatory at all. I tend to agree with you that a very good engineering organization would enforce data-first design and maintenance practices and build types around that. But unfortunately a lot of places don't operate that way and so my comment was meant in more of a general sense, not in a "types cannot possibly be useful at a systems level" way.
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At the risk of being inflammatory, I would say that you've been looking at poorly designed systems.
A running joke about Google engineers is that all they do is shuffle data from one ProtoBuf to another. It's largely true. The upshot of that is that every single service/system has common, typed definitions of the data structures they use and require. Data never drifts out of sync.
To be sure, a lot of the problems I dealt with there were around data structure migration on large systems — but there was never any uncertainty about the structure of the data itself.
I like JSON APIs, but I think JSON especially contributes to people getting hand-wavy and casual about the structure of data across systems in stupid ways (see NoSQL vs SQL).
I don't think that's inflammatory at all. I tend to agree with you that a very good engineering organization would enforce data-first design and maintenance practices and build types around that. But unfortunately a lot of places don't operate that way and so my comment was meant in more of a general sense, not in a "types cannot possibly be useful at a systems level" way.