LSP is nice, but it's not an engineering marvel. It's just a text protocol. It's not even a great text protocol; it's okay, but not great. There's been lots of "LSP-like" protocols over the years, even decades, it's just that none of them really became a standard (partly because no one actually invested the time in writing one, and it just used an "ad-hoc protocol"). And of course the general concept of "process A communicates with process B over a text protocol" is all around us.
Like I said, I like LSP, but a great exceptional feat of engineering it is not.
This applies to most of VSCode as near as I can tell.
The thing is it successfully had work put in so that it’s a standard. “They did a thing that basically no one succeeded in doing” is, imo, proof of something.
I don't think anyone tried to really make a standard, as far as I know. But even if they did, there's lots of reasons why some things take off and others don't: putting in the work as you mentioned, whether it's any good, marketing, state of other tooling and tech, zeitgeist at the time ("timing"), etc.
Would something like Go have taken off 20 years ago? I'm not so sure, the zeitgeist at the time was very much in the direction of dynamic languages. And would Python take off if it was released today? Not so sure about that either.
But you know, putting in the work to write down a specification isn't really a marvel of engineering. It's ... just putting in the work.
> But you know, putting in the work to write down a specification isn't really a marvel of engineering. It's ... just putting in the work.
It's no marvel of engineering, but someone did put in the work, and others used it, more that can be said about many other things that might be "better engineered".
I never said they were "better engineered". I only wanted to refute that "VSCode is one of the greatest pieces of engineering of our time", which went to use LSP as an example in this (sub)thread.
Like I said, I like LSP, but a great exceptional feat of engineering it is not.
This applies to most of VSCode as near as I can tell.