by lproven | 2025-11-03 10:57:46+00:00
> It's amazing how much technical discourse revolves around impressions.

One of the single most incisive comments in the whole discussion.

My take: people don't take the time to even try to understand some things of only moderate complexity. They dismiss it as "too hard", drop it, accept the received wisdom and move on.

This is also behind the curse of "best practice". After coming up on 40Y in the industry, my impression is that this boils down to "this is what the previous guys did and it worked". In other words, very close to "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" as a methodology.

What it means: "you don't need to think about it -- just do this." Which quickly turns to "you don't need to understand it, just do this."

Why I am saying this: because I think you're absolutely right, much of the industry discourse runs on impressions -- but there is a second factor that matters as much.

People form impressions of things they don't understand well themselves by listening to the opinions of people they trust. The question then is: where do they find those opinions?

There are communities of like-minded folks, folks interested in particular tech or whatever. Rust folks, "plain ol' C" folks, C++ folks, "let's replace C with $something_more_modern" folks (where that's D or Nim or whatever).

But those communities group together too. They hang out in the same fora, talk on the same media, etc. Result, there are hierarchies of communities, and the result is like religions: people in one church know of other related churches fairly well, and some are siblings, relatives, whatever; others are hated enemies to be scorned.

But they know next to nothing of other religions which are too far away, too different.

So when people are comparing the offspring of C, they are probably from the Unix faith. They don't know that but everyone they ever talked to, every software they ever saw, is a Unix, so they don't realise there's anything else.

I see passionate debates about Rust vs Go and things and I strongly suspect these are problems fixed among the Wirthian languages decades ago. Walls of text, thousands of lines of code, for things fixed in Modula-2 or Ada 30 or 40 years ago and those folks moved on.

Whereas the Lisp folks never had those problems and are politely baffled by tools that still have flaws that deeply passionate 20-somethings and 30-somethings are calling each other names about and blocking each other over.

I've had people in dead seriousness tell me that ALL OTHER SOFTWARE is written in C at the lowest level. They are amazed when I laugh at them. C is a niche in a niche and the team that wrote C and Unix moved on to Aleph and Limbo and one splinter wrote Go.

The Forth people laugh at the vastly verbose Lisp folks and their forgotten million-line OSes.

The APL people smile at the painfully iterative Forth and Lisp folks.

Unix won on servers and it's pushing Windows off desktops, now relegating everything else to embedded and realtime and the handwritten-by-one-person systems, where nobody else will ever read their code.

I can't help but think that there must be a better way. Not sure what it is. Classes in comparative software religion on Youtube? Sports style competitions for the smallest/simplest/fastest ways to solve particular problems in languages people might not consider? Tools for easier linkage between less-known languages and well-known OSes?