I recently appeared on the Tech Lead Journal podcast, and the host, Henry Suryawirawan, picked up on a comment I made about the cost of a mistake I made many years ago, namely, the mistake of underestimating the importance of Hibernate’s StatelessSession, and of not including it in the Java Persistence API.



You might think my statement a bit hyperbolic, and I guess it was intended in that vein, but let me give you a quick order-of-magnitude computation suggesting that my estimate was not far off.



The cost of this mistake should rightly include:

Hibernate Blog

Gavin King, creator of Hibernate, reflects on a costly design mistake: failing to include Hibernate's StatelessSession in the Java Persistence API. Using a rough order-of-magnitude calculation across 10,000 projects, $10,000/project/year in wasted effort, and 25 years of usage, he estimates the cumulative cost at around $1 billion. He acknowledges the benefits of Hibernate far outweigh this mistake, but uses it to illustrate that even seemingly minor API design decisions can carry enormous long-term costs when integrated over time and scale.

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