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On the other hand some of the most powerful and widely used programs are those that operate on byte arrays with schemas in-band (the web) or otherwise specified at runtime (SQL).

Imagine if you needed to write C structs in Nginx or Postgres corresponding to all the business objects and data types they’re going to touch. Worse, imagine you need to thread them through all the implementation!

Many business applications are written that way. I think there are opportunities on the table to stop doing it.



So. There's json parsers, serde, row polymorphism, anon structs, macros, monads, and dictionaries.

They all do the same type of thing, but that isn't abstracting data. That's abstracting the population of data or the serializing of it.

However none of that is ever going to know that the name field needs to strip out the first three characters, rot 13, and then parse as a guid.

Someone still needs to know what the data you're getting means. And there's no way to shake that.

Although people do try and then we get lists like: things programmers don't understand about names.




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