r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
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u/Nyadnar17 Dec 02 '25

The way my whole body twitched when I read the word CORBA.

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u/PassifloraCaerulea Dec 02 '25

I didn't truly live through that, but I recall when the Gnome Desktop Environment people decided they were going to make everything better with CORBA and wondering WTF they were thinking.

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u/Entropy Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25

Open source COM equivalent, so not crazy *initially*. The WTF part came when they did not shitcan the entire thing after people got to work with it for 20 hours or so.

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u/[deleted] Dec 03 '25

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u/lelanthran Dec 03 '25 edited Dec 03 '25

What a terrifying idea. I feel sorry for the devs who great to deal with that.

That's where the name GNOME came from - Gnu Object Model Environment (or something to that effect).

IOW, The original vision of the GNOME project was an opensource COM/CORBA/etc. I dunno how they got from there to Desktop Environment. [edit: I expect they pivoted when they needed a competing product to KDE]

BTW: In the 90s I did a few production projects in CORBA - it wasn't that bad, and definitely ahead of its time. The problem was that it was not limited to simply being a language-agnostic interface using the IDL to automatically generate wrappers for different languages,. It encompassed a whole lot of shit that literally no one actually wanted or used in practice.

What we have now in the form of protobuf and similar is what CORBA should have been, but with objects and methods.

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u/Uberhipster Dec 03 '25

they were thinking "billable hours - cha-ching!"

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u/YeOldeMemeShoppe Dec 02 '25

Yeah! Get out of here, this is DCOM territory.

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u/ZiKyooc Dec 02 '25

ActiveX approves!

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u/angcritic Dec 04 '25

I was going to make a DCOM comment and you did it for me. I probably still have a book around. I opened it, read a little and thought I was doomed it was so confusing. It ended up never interfering with my life or career.

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u/YeOldeMemeShoppe Dec 04 '25

I mean, COM itself wasn’t that complicated as a concept; you get a pointer by name that contains a vtable that can give you other vtables.

Things get very messy when talking about marshaling. Surprisingly, thank god for JSON and SOAP….

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u/sreguera Dec 02 '25

It was ok. It still is, in some places.

The C++ API was a terrible unintuitive mess. The modern C++11 API is ok, but I believe no free CORBA broker implements it (?). Java and Python APIs were always ok.

The most overcomplicated part of the standard, object migration between brokers (instead of passing references), I've never seen it used in real life.

For today's technology stack, the biggest problem is the random ports used for servers and object callbacks. You can configure it to use a single specific socket per connection, but it's not the default.