this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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Programmer Humor
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To any non-js dev taking this too seriously: A good half of the technologies mentioned in this meme are redundant, you only need to learn one of them (in addition to the language). It's like complaining that there are too many Linux distributions to learn: you don't, you just pick one and go with it.
Part of the problem is choosing from those options (when you have a choice). Open-ended questions like that nuke my productivity when starting a project because I spend more time researching and weighing options than actually programming.
As time has gone on, I've increasingly become a fan of restricting how many ways devs can do something.
Might be my ADHD, but I can never just do that. But I posit that excess choice hurts feature development pace by wasting effort on reinventing the wheel.
A good example is the Nix ecosystem:
Nix expression language provides almost no constraints, leaving users to do the same things in a bunch of ways, and preventing a clear notion of which way is generally best from arising...which makes upstream super conservative with implementing new features the community wants, because any decision might break one those things. Leaving us with a 5+ year old "experimental" feature + CLI used by 80% of users, but no consensus on an official implementation. So many simple upstream changes become a series of 3 competing community projects providing a solution for that feature, further preventing consensus.
I want to add that, like you, I've become a big fan of restricting the numbers of ways to do something.
IMO, It's more time wasted choosing, more time wasted reviewing, and makes it easier to overlook errors. I want more opinionated languages and frameworks.
I reallt like the approach taken in Rust's borrow checker, where good, safe, and sometimes overbearing design choices are enforced by default, but you can explicitly declare exemptions. Makes identifying potential problem code blocks easy too.