Comment by btown

In the spirit of http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html ...

"Every program attempts to expand until its clients and counterparties are so varied in protocol version (and implementation competency) that it must deserialize every field as optional, and handle said absence in business logic. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

(On a related note... I would give the world for Python to have optional chaining/safe navigation operators. The fact that Typescript is the Language that Makes Untrusted APIs Tolerable, while Python is the Language of Low-Level AI Iteration, and both have horrible ergonomics when trying to implement the other, is a source of endless frustration to me.)