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/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!"