> How much effort, in the non-mathematical sense, are you willing to expend to discover if there is a lower minimum? Go over the hill to your left and you discover a minimum that is greater than the one you were just in. Go over the hill to the right and you find a lower minimum.

> This happens in just about anything you can imagine, but let’s consider IDEs. You start using an IDE and it makes one particular thing particularly easy, and it makes it so easy that you don’t go looking for something even easier. You can’t spend all of your time wondering if there’s a slightly better way of doing things.

This argument resonates fairly well with me. I generally view IDEs as low commitment, a rapid learning curve to completion, with very hard caps on what you are going to find. You'll understand what the tool gives you, and then you'll be done. There's some trading/collecting hooks to keep you feeling like you can improve, to collect all the best plugins to improve the base system, but you're still a consumer, hunting for solutions, and you never really gain intimacy, understanding, or general prowess, evaluating your gains from a position of general ignorance as to what you're really buying/using. Being an end-user is being stuck at some minimum, having milked the curve you're at, until someone else comes disrupts your world for you. You make no real gains on your own, develop no only superficial mastery, mastering of the pane-of-glass atop the environment you dwell in.

It's really really hard to make a stronger better pitch for the school of lifelong learning & struggle. Often IDEs are a great way to understand what is possible, what tools to expect, but once you have a baseline, getting back into the command line, the terminal, the console & re-learning the hard way how to re-enact many of the things your IDE does for you is really hard. The learning curve is super slow, it takes ages to get out of the bottom reaches & start to feel ok. But you're gaining mastery not just of the programming job, but of the operating system, of the shell, of the real genuine honest environment of computing. Your ability to understand & see what is happening is so much higher, has such a more real connection than the pane-of-glass interface. Your ability to evaluate & direct yourself grows & amplifies over time, only if you invest in yourself & think of yourself as someone seeking a truthful engagement.

In general, I feel like the world has a lot of "what is the use case"/"what is the business value" thinking, and there's kind of an aggressive anti-exploratory value system that hates geekiness, that hates learning, that despises the enrichment of humankind, that rejects possibility. To insist on fast immediate obvious worth is to miss the big picture, is toxic to healthy ecosystems & diversity's neandering, exploring many many many tentacles. I want to see a world culture that believes in honest, genuine interactions, not fancy indecypherable veneers of things. Papert's Constructivism/Constructionism is a spiritual boon, one essential to what humanity became, and we should cherish, protect, & grow this light. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructionism_(learning_theo...