Talk:Inner-platform effect

message: If you're a really really BAD programmer, perhaps we could have some of your work as example code so we can have citations.
I don't know maybe you're a college professor and your students just can't stop using XML as a database....
.. or even an epic student of yours who keeps biting off more than he can chew and decided to program the entire relationship model in the client.. no small feat that lol...yeah this is a rant article
DarkShroom (talk) 13:40, 14 November 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations required 

message: This article reads like a rant, especially statements like this:  "Such designs rarely make their way into real world production systems, however, because performance tends to be little better than abysmal"
1. It would be interesting to see the author struggle in vain to find a cite for such a claim.
2. Have you ever worked in a production environment?  "Abysmal" is the norm.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.73.197.58 (talk) 20:56, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV? 

message: I noticed the Emacs link in the related pages. It made me laugh out loud, but should it really be there?
Sijmen (talk) 02:02, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Emacs link appropriate? 

message: Is this notable? The only examples are from the site of the person who seems to have coined the term @ thedailywtf.com.  No other references, wouldn't this constitute original research?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 159.53.46.141 (talk) 18:01, 4 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: While the article does need more references, I have seen this in the real world with companies I've worked with that create their own scripting language. At some point, things get out of hand, and developers of the language just start tossing everything bit of functionality (from whatever variety of languages they prefer) in. I've also seen this in my own code when I've placed a wrapper around a legacy library. I starting creating methods to emulate the base library, even though they weren't required, just 'to cover my bases' so to speak, when direct calls would have been just fine and the functionality itself wasn't even necessary. It's amazing how tempting it can be to just lob functionality in just for the heck of it. It's almost addictive! --Daydreamer302000 (talk) 13:09, 10 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  I've just re-tagged this only to have it removed again. Notability is not asserted by people saying so in edit summaries; the article needs to indicate the notability of the subject through the use of reliable sources. I'll be re-tagging on my next pass; the next step will be an AfD, as we have too many articles on neologisms from the Daily WTF. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 20:00, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  ...And indeed, having looked at one of the references, it seems like the proliferation of this junk is due to a very common anti-platform on Wikipedia: WP:WAX, where the existence of some random piece of cruft elsewhere is used as an argument for starting whole new islands of cruft. This article appears to be a direct consequence of that line of thought. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 20:10, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  The two best sources for this are already noted, and in their own separate articles: JWZ's emacs comment and Greenspun's Lisp comment. As an instance of where it occurs most frequently, it's a close call between EAV systems and the various forms of recycled SQL injection that pass for creative design in some older organisations with rancid legacies. Andy Dingley (talk) 20:37, 3 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text:  So it's synthesis; using disparate sources which don't mention this subject at all (both of them predate its coining by over a decade) to advance an original theory (in this case, one of the thousands of cute terms made up in the name of humour by The Daily WTF). This is fine for someone's blog, but not for an encyclopedia. I'll be taking this to AfD on my next pass. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 08:57, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

text: Oh hell yeah is it notable! This is a giant problem in the software engineering world, that is way too little known. (Anti-patterns in general are way too little known.) I’ve seen it many times in my career, and especially those “Enterprise Consultant” types never learn from it and come up with it again. I had to fix and fight countless of those. And there are so many example, you can’t even count them. The web-dev and Java business world is full of them. XSTL, Typo3, tons of scripting languages implemented in scripting languages, like TypoScript or XSLT,  frameworks over frameworks over platforms on Java, etc, etc, etc. We have a saying here at my company: There are two kinds of software developers: Those who know and avoid it. And bad developers.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 188.100.192.146 (talk) 05:24, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

text: I agree with the last (also anonymous) comment. I am not a wikiepdia editor so I don't know the rules for "notability" in force here, but I have seen this pattern countless times in real world software development; incidently, in a completely different domain: hardcore numerics. Needless to say, whenever you encounter it, you're in for BIG trouble. I've also heard this spoken about with this term ("inner platform effect") many times with many different developers. The original source for the term probably is thedailywtf website; but realize that this is one of the most popular website dealing with development issues, and that this particular inner platform effect post is one of its most notable posts. The term definitely caught on; this is not very surprising considering the seriousness of this particular problem, and the frequency in which it occurs.128.112.122.172 (talk) 23:13, 28 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notable 

message: I see more and more companies advertising to retrieve information about them from a site inside Facebook instead from their real web homepages. Then Facebook starts to resemble the functionality of information retrieval that the web already has. Maybe this can be discussed as an example?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.5.149.19 (talk) 23:29, 4 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Companies at Facebook 

message: I just reverted some changes. This article is obviously a bit incendiary, but just neutering it is not a good solution IMHO. --4368 (talk) 04:46, 12 October 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Little secret: There is no such thing as a ”neutral” point of view. That’s like saying “There’s an absolute coordinate system for the universe.”, which for Wikipedia’s admins is always followed by “And obviously its center is my own position”. — 85.197.55.21 (talk) 16:13, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Changes reverted 

message: I've always considered MediaWiki to be a very good example of the IPE; should this perhaps be mentioned?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.176.216.201 (talk) 12:07, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: If there's a third-party citation that it's an important one ... - David Gerard (talk) 13:11, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: LOL! Double-joke combo! Accuracy bonus: 140%! XD — 89.0.248.224 (talk) 12:52, 30 October 2013 (UTC)

text: Yes, YES, it should absolutely be mentioned. But that’s like saying God doesn’t exist inside the Vatican. ;) Nobody cares for outside perceptions of reality, because theirs is seen as the only right one / ghospel, because they built their whole world view and acceptance of themselves on top of that cloud. So they ignore rationality (aka “original research”, as they call it), don’t trust your word (Studies have shown that “He’s not part of the cabal! DELETE!” is hard reality here), and demand “citations” by “reliable, trustworthy third parties”. Where that somehow always includes those sources that happen to conveniently fit their personal world views delusions. So TL;DR: Good luck with that! ;) — 89.0.248.224 (talk) 12:52, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Don’t worry. It will be mentioned, as soon as Wikipedia is replaced by a distributed authority-free P2P web-of-trust-based knowledge base that can’t be controlled by anyone anymore. I’m working on that already. But I’d like some motivating competition. :) – 85.197.55.21 (talk) 16:11, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  MediaWiki is an example 

message: * TypoScript = just a shitty PHP implemented in … PHP!! – 89.0.248.224 (talk) 12:23, 30 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  More examples of the inner-platform anti-pattern: 

message: I think it's pretty much obvious to anyone who has ever used a SQL database professionally that storing all the data into one big 3-column table is a terrible and pointless misuse. The "[citation needed]" can be safely removed from that paragraph. 82.225.162.56 (talk) 20:08, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citations not needed about using entity-attribute-value to bypass the RDBMS 

message: This strikes me as a valid topic, but article is poorly written, and lacks focus and references.  The problem of practitioners in any discipline assuming the problems of their clients are the same as their own is notable and deserves explanation, but the article reads more like a meandering personal essay than an encyclopedia entry.  Further, it's not clear how some examples illustrate the main idea.  It seems more like a list of personal pet peeves.  At least one of these critiques seems to reflect a problem with the author misunderstanding of the subject rather than a problem with the subject.  The lack of citations amplifies the other problems. 
Ericfluger (talk) 14:52, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Start over? 

message: It's become pretty common for new non-relational data stores to use off the shelf SQL database managers as persistence layers, not because they are relational, but because they already have the mechanisms required to implement the alternative model.  ZopeDB can use MySQL, IIRC Mozilla's implementation of Indexeddb uses Sqlite3 (which is a bit ironic), etc.  This doesn't seem to bother anyone.  I don't know why, but in the last couple of years it's become fashionable to single out implementations of the EAV model built on SQL database managers for criticism, presumably because the critics do not understand EAV at all, (and perhaps the relational model all that well as it seems possible that EAV could be used as an alternative representation of relational data, but that may be a stretch.)  
Applied appropriately, the EAV model can be extremely useful, particularly for data collection in clinical and laboratory settings, or for serialization and it's turning out be useful in other settings where it's important to track the changes in values over time (see Datomic).  Also, the semantic web and RDF involve EAV modeling. It is a tool that is well suited to some jobs and not to others. It doesn't make much sense to me to criticize a paint brush for not being a hammer.
The Wikipedia article on EAV explains it pretty well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model
(Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that an EAV table can be tossed into a conventionally structured SQL database and be treated like any other table.  It can't.) 
Further, it's not clear to me how this illustrates how developers can sometimes design to meet their own needs rather than those of their clients.  I suppose EAV data could be used as an intermediate format when parsing large amounts of unfamiliar unstructured data into structured form, and it might make an OK temporary small data store for prototyping, and if there's no follow through those temporary constructs could wind up in a release product, but that strikes me as a different kind of problem.  
Summing up, I think that unless it can be tied in more effectively and much better supported by references that bit should go because it is both arguably incorrect, and arguably irrelevant. 
Ericfluger (talk) 16:19, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  EAV Example Inappropriate  

message: The basic idea seem to be that developers sometimes base new products on the tools or constructs they use themselves.  Much of the article seems to focus on problems this can cause, but I'm not sure that the consequences are always negative.  Most modern word processors have been influenced by EMACs to some degree, the spreadsheet was a way of making two dimensional arrays usable by non-technical end users, etc.  I don't see those as negative consequences.  So are we talking about a general phenomenon that can have either helpful or unhelpful consequences, or a mix of both, or are we talking only about when this phenomenon becomes a problem.  If the latter, how do we determine what's a problem? 
It also seems to me that whether applying familiar tools or constructs to a new application is helpful or not depends a lot on the use case, and that the notion of antipatterns may be a bit too broad.  Further, parts of the article and parts of this discussion seem to be about antipatterns in general rather than inner-platform effect in particular. There seems to be some criticism here of yanking a technique or construct out one context and tying to force fit it into another, which granted can be a huge problem, but is it the same problem?  
Of course that perception may reflect a poor understanding of the subject on my part, but that would illustrate my point wouldn't it? 
Ericfluger (talk) 16:40, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs better explanation of basic concept. 

message: Sorry if I'm repeating myself a bit here, but...
while I find the topic notable and quite intriguing, it also strikes me as very difficult to stay objective about.
Some examples of anti-patterns listed in this discussion strike as off-base.  For example, I disagree with the suggestion that wiki-style mark-up is a dilution of HTML and somehow worse.  There have been various types of mark-up since the earliest days of computer typesetting, mostly with different goals, different requirements, and different degrees of ease of use for particular user bases.  HTML is very versatile, but not necessarily a best fit for everything and in an application aimed at a broad audience supporting mark-up that is both easier to read and to write makes sense to me.  In fact I would say that requiring naive end users to write in HTML (or a subset deemed to be easier) might be a better illustration of Inner-platform effect than say Markdown, reStructured text, etc., which could be regarded as departures from the inner-model to better fit the use case.  
But that's me.  I have my reasons and I'm sure the authors of the comments I'm criticizing have theirs.  I'm just pointing that this is a matter of opinion that informed people can reasonably disagree about, and I doubt it will be the only one.
I'm not suggesting dropping the topic, but I am suggesting that the topic needs some special caution re NPOV.
Ericfluger (talk) 17:15, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subjectivity Minefield  

message: This article constitutes original research.
Yes, the phenomenon is "real."  I have programmed for 35 years, and I can say, "Yes, this is something that happens, exists, is occasionally noted on."
However, developing an school of knowledge about this reality is NOT the work of Wikipedia.  That is work for people who study the phenomenon of the programming, outside of Wikipedia.  Conceptual development need to be developed outside of Wikipedia, rather than in Wikipedia.  The temptation, on my part, to start developing distinctions and make comment on other opinions here is high.  But I recognize that doing so, while fun, is not the same as creating an online encyclopedia.
This activity would be much better suited for Ward's Wiki (C2), and the for publications in the computer programming or computer science world, than on Wikipedia.  Once the language and network of ideas are agreed upon and well established in the programming world, then I think it makes sense to have a Wikipedia article on it.
In the meantime, I think this article should be deleted.
LionKimbro (talk) 18:08, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Original Research 

message: Conway's Law should be in See Also. I'm going to add it. Consider discussing the relationship. TheodoricStier (talk) 16:02, 25 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Close Relationship to Conway's Law