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Rauchg | 1 year ago

Falsehoods programmers believe: the OSI model

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devman0|1 year ago

Falsehoods programmers believe: the OSI model is useless

jerf|1 year ago

Sure, it's misleading, needs a lot of "interpretation" doing a non-trivial amount of the lifting to make it map to anything in the real world, mismatches things that happen in the real world while leaving no room for other things that happen in the real world a lot, and will lead anyone who tries to use it to understand the real world deeply astray, but it isn't always wrong about absolutely everything so it has some non-zero "utility".

Fine. It's not wrong about absolutely everything all the time. It isn't bereft of all truth. It's just something that is of net negative value. I see no value in insisting on trying to "rescue" a net-negative value model of the world.

I suppose you could say ultimately I agree with you though. The OSI model isn't useless. It's worse than useless. You're better off trying to understand networking from basic first principles than through the lens it provides.

akira2501|1 year ago

It's useful. It's not controlling.

dathinab|1 year ago

It's not useless, just bad at it's job.

I mean in practice it's so broken, imprecise and messy to a point it's often more misleading then helpful and IMHO should have been replaced in teaching with something better well over a decade ago.

And to be clear I'm not saying it's bad because some small implementation details don't fit, it's bad in it's job of being a high level abstraction where you ignore many implementation details.