@Nick Smith I don't think so, but it's just because you're talking about the quality of the communication and I'm talking about the amount. I'm saying that when protocol boundaries match team boundaries, cross-team discussion is only ever needed when the protocol changes, whereas without protocol boundaries, the teams potentially step on each other's toes with every change. You're right about maintainability, but today it's very easy technologically and organizationally to enforce a single programming language across the organization, whereas it's nearly impossible for people to collaborate in multiple languages at any level smaller than a server. That's a lever that we just can't pull, even in cases where it might make collaboration more efficient. A type of collaboration I see a lot is when my team needs another team's expertise. An RPC protocol can be written to satisfy almost any language's type system guarantees, so theoretically the only difference between calling a method written in the same language and one in a different language should be where the computer looks for the implementation. But when I ask a team of machine learning experts to write a GetRecommendedMovies() function for my web site, and their preferred ML library is TensorFlow, their implementation strategy varies dramatically based on which language I want to call the function from. I don't think we necessarily want that collaboration overhead. Usually, we don't gain anything from it. And if in the course of writing GetRecommendedMovies(), they accidentally introduce a memory leak, does the user get a connection-lost error because the whole server goes down, or is the movie recommendation part of the page just empty because I handle the error on my side? Do I have to fix their bug to work on other parts of my page? And if I want to continue development with a working version of their code (not just a black hole that behaves as if the function never existed), do I have to root cause the bug to figure out which commits to revert, or can I just back out all of that team's changes (the ones on their side of the protocol boundary) from the past week? Can I do that without losing everyone else's changes from that same period? This is the shape of my collaborative coding dream. 🙂

In my experience the experience is great when 2 or 3 people collaborate over short periods of time, but goes awry when we go overboard and try to use it over larger groups of people and over longer periods of time.

I’d love to hear more. I mentioned earlier in this thread how integral I think it is to my department’s functioning (~100s of engineers).

Let me go back and refresh my memory, thanks.

Yeah I'm generally disillusioned with all the system level composition methods we have. Libraries, services, microservices etc. We end up with a lot of model duplication and pervasive reimplementation. There's tight coupling between higher level and lower level processes. E.g. the higher level business logic is encoded in the topology, so if you're just changing an implementation detail, you still have to change the business logic code.

People who don't understand modules just haven't written large enough programs. Once you hit 100k lines or so, it really helps keep things organized. The module system of Modula-2 was why i had several software companies abandon C and switch to Modula-2. Modula-2 for those not familiar with it, was the 10 year later sequel to Pascal by Prof. Wirth. he later did Oberon and Oberon 2 to build the Lilith machine + OS. Anyway the JS module system is the mangled subset of the Modula-2 system. It had the unique ability at the time to allow separate compilation, and during the link phase it would detect out-of-date errors. very clever, and when you have teams changing API's all the time, it forces it to be tightly controlled. A great deal of the allure of many of the so-called new languages is basically a recapitulation of this module system, which prevent one from calling a function with the wrong type of arguments or wrong number of arguments. The Modula-2 compiler i used, formerly stony brook is now freeware at ADW. Lightning fast, tiny executables, way better than C in every aspect I can think of.