This looks amazing. Not just for the software (which itself looks very nice), but for the philosophy described in this post.
Some quotables:
> Abscissa applications are Rust libraries. One of our eventual goals is to allow several Abscissa applications to coexist in the same binary, allowing for things like embedding subcommands/subapplications.
Yes! I hate how often functionality is locked away behind a UI (whether GUI or command-line). It drastically hinders composability, and hence reuse. (Yes, you can recover some of this with shell scripts, but you're working with text streams or files, and not the richly structured data that you'd normally have within a process.)
> As David Heinemeier Hansson says, “Great frameworks are extractions, not inventions”
Yes! Don't create "a pluggable, reusable framework for everything" -- create things, then extract the common parts. It's reusable because it's already in multiple places. You don't waste time thinking up possibilities for reuse and customization, because you're already generalizing pre-existing patterns.
> Abscissa borrows some ideas from Entity-Component-System design (though we insist that it is not an ECS and should not be described as such)
I love that they have the wisdom to take ideas from ECS (which is a tragically less-known form of architecture), and the self-restraint to not use that label when it doesn't apply.
Ignoring the technical merits altogether, this post is really well-written and considered. I appreciate the level of detail (and humor) here, and it really makes me very keen to use Abscissa. This is all the more, perhaps, because most of what I've used Rust for has been exactly the kind of command-line tooling Abscissa is targeted at, rather than microservices or embedded software. (I think all of those things are really cool, and we definitely need Rust in that space, but pay some mind to us folks doing the unstylish command-line stuff!)
To your first comment, I work in tools and infra at $bigco, and at this point I essentially require that any newish tool expose an internal API that the tool is an unprivileged consumer of.
CLI? Your Python or Java binary should be a flag parser that calls all logic out to a library. Web api? It consumes an internal library and the server just parses and passes arguments.
(Obviously this doesn't always work for rich interactive apps, but often things aren't).
Then adding a new interface is easy (and can sometimes be done automatically). It took a new hire on my team like 2 days to add a new interface to a tool that followed this pattern, when I've asked other teams for similar, estimates in weeks :/
It also has a side effect of improved testability and maintainability.
Both the name of the company (iqlusion) and the name of the framework (Abscissa) are references to the encrypted Kryptos sculpture on the grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. Its first plain text message says,
> BETWEEN SUBTLE SHADING AND THE ABSENCE OF LIGHT LIES THE NUANCE OF IQLUSION
The second message is encrypted with the key "ABSCISSA".
Some quotables:
> Abscissa applications are Rust libraries. One of our eventual goals is to allow several Abscissa applications to coexist in the same binary, allowing for things like embedding subcommands/subapplications.
Yes! I hate how often functionality is locked away behind a UI (whether GUI or command-line). It drastically hinders composability, and hence reuse. (Yes, you can recover some of this with shell scripts, but you're working with text streams or files, and not the richly structured data that you'd normally have within a process.)
> As David Heinemeier Hansson says, “Great frameworks are extractions, not inventions”
Yes! Don't create "a pluggable, reusable framework for everything" -- create things, then extract the common parts. It's reusable because it's already in multiple places. You don't waste time thinking up possibilities for reuse and customization, because you're already generalizing pre-existing patterns.
> Abscissa borrows some ideas from Entity-Component-System design (though we insist that it is not an ECS and should not be described as such)
I love that they have the wisdom to take ideas from ECS (which is a tragically less-known form of architecture), and the self-restraint to not use that label when it doesn't apply.
Ignoring the technical merits altogether, this post is really well-written and considered. I appreciate the level of detail (and humor) here, and it really makes me very keen to use Abscissa. This is all the more, perhaps, because most of what I've used Rust for has been exactly the kind of command-line tooling Abscissa is targeted at, rather than microservices or embedded software. (I think all of those things are really cool, and we definitely need Rust in that space, but pay some mind to us folks doing the unstylish command-line stuff!)