> This is surprisingly basic knowledge for ending up on the front page.

Nothing wrong with that! Hacker News has a large audience of all skill levels. Well written explainers are always good to share, even for basic concepts.

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p1anecrazy 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In principle, I agree, but “a message queue is… a medium through which data flows from a source system to a destination system” feels like a truism.

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sigbottle 9 hours ago | parent [-]

For me, I've realized I often cannot possibly learn something if I can't compare it to something prior first.

In this case, as another user mentioned, the decoupling use case is a great one. Instead of two processes/API directly talking, having an intermediate "buffer" process/API can save you headache

	▲	nyrikki 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To add to this, The concept of connascence, and not coupling is what I find more useful for trade off analysis. Synchronous connascence means that you only have a single architectural quanta under Neil Ford’s terminology. As Ford is less religious and more respectful of real world trade offs, I find his writings more useful for real world problems. I encourage people to check his books out and see if it is useful. It was always hard to mention connascence as it has a reputation of being ivory tower architect jargon, but in a distributed system world it is very pragmatic.

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coronapl 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Agree! In fact, I would appreciate more well written articles explaining basic concepts on the front page of Hacker News. It is always good to revisit some basic concepts, but it is even better to relearn them. I am surprised by how often I realize that my definition of a concept is wrong or just superficial.

	▲	SAI_Peregrinus an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Also it's nice to have a set of well-written explainers for when someone asks about a concept.