On 1/8/19 9:31 AM, Töma Gavrichenkov wrote:
8 Jan. 2019 г., 20:19 <niels=nanog@bakker.net>:
In the real world, doing the correct thing
— such as writing RFC compliant code —
is often harder than doing an incorrect thing, yes.
Evidently, yes.
I "grew up" during the early days of PPP. As a member of the press I attended an "inter-op" session at Telebit's campus, and watched as a collection of engineers and programmers matched up implementations of PPP and found bugs in both the Proposed Standard and in the implementations thereof. Watching these guys with all sorts of data monitors trying to figure out who goofed was an interesting and fascinating experience. During my stint with the Telecommunications Industry Associate TR-30 committee hashing out modem standards like V.32 et al and V.25 ter was a similar exercise -- one that lead to me being in a near fight in a parking lot in San Jose with a Microsoft enginner over clarity problems with the proposed Standard for side-channel protocol. "Can you do better?" "Yes." "Prove it." And I did. My proposal was accepted by all, even the Microsoft guy. (We continued to collaborate until he cashed out of the company.)