Works when you're picking the software. Less so in most companies where you spend 75% of your time interacting with half-broken, constantly-changing, barely-interoperable programs and web-services that someone else chose.

I've had an experience like this recently in Java. One of the most storied and heinous areas of Java development: so-called "web services." This is the whole SOAP+WSDL hell that did incalculable damage to the Java language and can be credited with the rise of REST as a sane alternative.

I had a system I needed to integrate into a workflow engine. I looked at the available interfaces and, noticing that the SOAP API was the most feature complete of the bunch, I figured I'd give it a try.

Guess what; no one is iterating on this stuff anymore. The standards specifications quit changing years ago so the targets aren't moving. The libraries are feature complete, solid and efficient and only infrequent bug fixes are appearing now. It works wonderfully.

So now you can grab a WSDL, stick on the resource path, add a code generation step to the build and it all "just works." The endless backflips and somersaults it took to get this stuff working back in the day has been evolved out of the stack and we're left with simple, type-safe RPC over HTTP, which is all most people ever really wanted.

I joked recently that these days, if you see a XML file in a project it means there is a higher probability that the project is good.

It means someone of those who make it is capable of making pragmatic decisions.

Agree. With yaml infested cloud native asshatery everywhere, the xml or simple properties file based project look very decent to me.

I've been a programmer long enough to see things being reinvented over and over again, just under a different name or written in a different language, or now it's "cloud native" and "serverless" and "ready for microservices". The longer I witness this cycle of reinvention the more annoyed I become by it. It's crazy to think that all the work we did in the 80's, 90's and 00's is just thrown away like that, only for those same things to be reinvented and implemented from scratch again with all the experience from the previous iteration lost. Programmers seem to behave much more like the fashion industry than anything else.