Bill de hÓra, a software engineer, writes about programming languages, APIs, engineering leadership, and working with AI agents.
Commenters cite his posts on efficient API paging and on Go as examples of technical writing.
> this article is about technology
Not, it is not. Here are some articles about technology:
http://www.brython.info/
http://dehora.net/journal/2013/06/01/on-go/
http://ninjasandrobots.com/three-mistakes-i-see-web-designers-make-over-and-over-again
http://moron4hire.tumblr.com/post/51904590190/processing-and-racket
The article this discussion is about is entirely about politics and economics, as is the resultant discussion. You will note that there is no discussion of "oh, if only there were technology to fix that problem". There is, and it was not employed in this case. Why it wasn't, and the consequences, are what the article is about.
> But I have to agree, that sadly there is a correlation between the low level of discussion and how political a topic is.
Anyone can comment on political articles, whereas it actually takes some interest and experience to discuss the relative merits of Ruby and Python, or Akka and Erlang.
Except that the technical limitations favor correct pagination — it's perfectly cacheable unlike the idiotic model: http://www.dehora.net/journal/2008/07/20/efficient-api-paging-count-down-not-up/
I think the true reason is really just pervasive ignorance — everybody royally fucks this up and doesn't question it for a second.
If you have N items with M on each page, and the same request for 'page 2' always returns items N-M through N-2M, with the contents shuffling off the end as N increases, you're an abject failure. SELECT … LIMIT M OFFSET N-(P-1)•M is in almost every single web app and totally bullshit. It's incredibly depressing, but we'll probably be stuck with it for at least the rest of our lifetimes.