by reikonomusha | 2025-05-26 04:19:16+00:00
This is a disappointing article from an author who usually writes excellent works. The article touches on a seedling of truth, but then takes it in a misleading direction. Unfortunately, I don't think this article actually inspires anybody to inquire more carefully or rationally within, but instead provides great thought-terminating ammunition that can be fired at anybody doing something not perceived as popular, ordinary, or boring. (And it's entirely in vogue to do so, with all the Grug Programmer, Use Boring Technology, etc. haranguing these days.)

What I think is true: A person will often hide their true rationale and/or intent of a decision behind a facade of weak, ex post facto objective arguments.

I think the author is absolutely right that it's OK to use something just because it makes you happy. Especially for personal/hobby projects, you don't need to be disingenuous and attempt convince the world that SWI-Prolog was truly the optimal technical choice to build your CRUD web app. Saying "I like Prolog and I built a CRUD web app using it" is perfectly fine. I'm really on board with this intellectual honesty.

Where the author goes off the rails is how he ties this criticism specifically to people who make "obscure" decisions. He does so especially through alienating caricature. The subtext of the article is that if you're not doing something conventional, then avoid being a sophist from the get-go and just say how you really feel: it makes you happy. He doesn't lend any credence whatsoever to the idea that an obscure choice may actually be technically justified.

The reality is that people who choose popular technologies often do so without any good reason either, and they too provide a facade of objective justification. They may not be writing blog posts that offend the author ("Why I Chose Python to Build XYZ") that reach the top of Hacker News, but they are espousing their own weak, ex post facto justifications in settings when their decision is challenged—which is almost inevitable, as their choice of popular technology isn't the only popular technology. They'll manufacture the same load of baloney for their decision in the same way the author's Common Lisper boogeyman does.

I would even make a stronger claim: People decide to use popular technologies because it makes them happy, and this happens far more often in load-bearing situations than the Obscure Weekend Technologists do. Furthermore, popularity serves as a sort of immunity to further technical inquiry.

This has led to far more technical derangement and damage writ large to the field than the weekend APLer writing about why they chose APL for a project, and I think it demands scrutiny the author doesn't offer in the slightest, despite being entirely relevant to his broader criticism.

More subjectively, after reading the article, I just felt the author is sour about something or has some sort of ax to grind. He's no stranger to obscure technologies (ex-Common Lisper; now disavows it) and has even created his own obscure programming language with an obscure Wirthian syntax written in an obscure OCaml. Maybe this article represents an admission of sorts.