The problem with standards

As part of a long rant about programming vs engineering, Peter Welch makes the statement, "standards are unicorns." Uhm, no. Just no. Unicorns are mythical. They don't exist. Standards do exist. They're largely useless, but they exist. I have linear feet of shelf space lined with the bloody things to attest to that.

So what's a better analogy for standards? I have a good one: Hurricane stew.

After a hurricane, the power is out. On every block in hurricane country there's a guy who has a giant vat used to boil crabs and crawfish and shrimp, that sits on a large burner powered by a large propane tank. You know, That Guy. So That Guy pulls out his vat and sets it up on the driveway in front of his carporch and tosses in some water and the contents of his refrigerator before they can spoil and go bad. And his neighbors come by and toss in the contents of *their* refrigerators before they can spoil and go bad. And as people finish cleaning out their refrigerators they bring more and more random scraps and throw them in, until what you have is a big glop of soupy strangeness containing a little of every possible food item that could ever exist. And then people subsist on this hurricane stew, this random glop of indistinguishable odds and ends, for the next week or two as it continues to slowly bubble on the driveway of That Guy and continues to occasionally get new glop thrown in as people throw the contents of their freezers into it too.

That's standards -- just a big glop of indistinguishable mess created by everybody under the sun throwing their own scraps and odds and ends into it, in the end being of use to absolutely no one except the people who threw scraps into it, who end up subsisting off of it for the rest of their careers because nobody else has the slightest freakin' idea what's in that opaque bubbling mess with the oddly-colored mist wafting off of it. And every single implementation of this "standard" is different and does things in a different way in the thousands of edge cases that have been thrown into the standard as possible way to do things because that was what was in someone's refrigerator err code base at the time the standard was created and so they tossed it in before it could spoil, driving anybody who has to write software that's "standards-compliant" slowly insane to the point of stabbing a two-foot-tall printout of the standard with a knife repeatedly, over and over, while screaming "Die! Die! Die!" at the top of their lungs.

That's standards. That's what they're good for.

- ELG