You can choose tools that make you happy

On Hacker News and Lobsters I often see blog posts with titles like: Why I built my startup on Common Lisp and DragonflyBSD Rewriting PyTorch in APL (year six update) I will never, ever, ever learn Docker The general form being: why Obscure Thing is better than Popular Thing. And always the justification is purportedly rational and technical. And always, always, it is complete sophistry. Why? Because people make technical decisions, in part, for affective reasons. They choose a technology because it feels good, or comfortable, or because it’s what they know. They choose obscure tech as a form of sympathetic magic, like the guy who uses NetBSD on a ThinkPad to feel like a William Gibson protagonist. They choose obsolete languages, like Lisp or Smalltalk, because they think of the heroic age of Xerox PARC, and they want to feel connected to that tradition. They find tools whose vibes align with theirs: Ada says “slow, conservative, baroque” while Rust says “fast-paced, unproven, par ... Read full article.