Re: We should have a Wheel/2 Research Group

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Mar 7, 2021 at 5:43 PM Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Sat, Mar 06, 2021 at 08:57:45PM -0500, Keith Moore wrote:
> > On 3/6/21 6:52 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
> > > One of the most frequent comments on new work proposals is 'no need to
> > > re-invent the wheel'.
>
> In the ASN.1 thread my point was that we should know well what came
> before before we replace it.
>
> Sometimes the old wheel has nothing worth saving other than the idea of
> it, and when the pain of using that old wheel gets bad enough, we must
> re-invent it.  Doing it ahead of time is risky and has opportunity costs
> such that the new wheel needs to be that much better than the old to be
> worth pursuing early -- it's an economic analysis problem.
>
> > > Well maybe we should do that more often. We have 40 years of path
> > > dependence in IETF working groups. Rethinking a protocol from scratch
> > > can have unexpected returns that are completely orthogonal to the
> > > original idea.
> >
> > As an exercise, yes.   But probably not with the expectation that the new
> > wheel will replace the old one.
> >
> > Second-system effect is alive and well.
>
> Insert standard "and now you have two problems" joke.
>
> Also: https://xkcd.com/927/
>
>