Show HN: MicroTCP, a minimal TCP/IP stack

Re:Show HN: MicroTCP, a minimal TCP/IP stack by nradov on Tuesday October 31, 2023 @08:07PM (#38093021)

Cool project. It reminds me of another minimal TCP implementation from Viewpoints Research Institute back in 2007. They managed to do it in under 200 lines of code by writing a parser that directly interprets the ASCII art diagrams in the IETF RFC. Which is kind of a bizarre approach, but very clever and somewhat self documenting.

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf

It's not really intended for production use, more as a demo of a new experimental programming language.

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Re:Show HN: MicroTCP, a minimal TCP/IP stack by cozis on Wednesday November 01, 2023 @06:00AM (#38096378)

Amazing! I would have NEVER thought of that! That's just another level of "following the standards"

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Re:Show HN: MicroTCP, a minimal TCP/IP stack by specialist on Wednesday November 01, 2023 @08:19AM (#38097268)

Thank you so much for sharing this.

What would you call this paradigm?

Ian Piumarta (this researcher) calls it "self implementing". https://www.piumarta.com/cv/bio.html

My best effort so far is "example driven programming", which is turrible.

I did something similar for HL7 specifications, at about the same time. Our consultants (what the kids today would probably call business analysts) would hammer out an "HL7 interface" document. (Think human readable OpenAPI for the time.) It'd serve as an actual contract, between us and the hospital, of sorts.

Being lazy, I wrote a parser (not BNF based, like Piumarta's work) which scrapped the "interface" and generated code. Implemented in minutes, instead of days or weeks.

I've since applied that strategy to other domains, with similar results.

But I have the hardest time describing this paradigm. Even when people see demos, they don't quite get it. This stuff is supposed to be hard, right? Surely I'm cheating somehow.

Naively, I've been thinking that if I coined an insipid new phrase, maybe it could become an inscrutable meme. Like "Agile Methodology" and "Extreme Programming" did. Catnip for PHBs.

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