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Akin's laws of spacecraft design apply to software engineering with only minimal adjustments:

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

For 39. replace "launch vehicle" with "technology".

In any case after over a decade of "web development" (as it was still called back when I started out) my position is that to an extent we need this sort of circus because it's the only way for businesses to invest into moving this field forward.

Take for example the titular XML: largely hot garbage in applications where we learned to use JSON now, pretty damn solid as a text representation of file formats, 5024 pages of OOXML's specification notwithstanding. The author points that out as well.

If you want less of that go work in a financial institution, where you'll find unironically rock-solid Java 8(or perhaps even 11 nowadays) and associated frameworks.



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