3 ms·

I'd say that it's all in the eye of the beholder. Not so long ago, everything FP or reactive programming was considered academic. Heck, even virtual machines,

by Yoric 4y ago

I'd say that it's all in the eye of the beholder. Not so long ago, everything FP or reactive programming was considered academic. Heck, even virtual machines, garbage-collectors, threads or distributed programming were considered academic. These days, who doesn't use most of these bricks? Which means... sadly, it means that I have no clue what the future holds for Elixir, or Erlang, or any technology that is perhaps a bit too much in advance on its time.

namaria 4y ago
I'm endlessly fascinated by the strong opinions people in software develop about tooling. I never saw it with such intensity anywhere else... I'd like to get more into that someday. Maybe because we use these tools with our minds so it's a very intimate thing. Maybe because people find hard to learn a set of tools due to so much of foundational knowledge behind it having been abstracted away so they develop mental defenses against other sets of tools as a rationalization of why they don't wanna lose the sunk cost...
- pmarreck 4y ago
  > Maybe because we use these tools with our minds so it's a very intimate thing. Maybe because people find hard to learn a set of tools due to so much of foundational knowledge behind it having been abstracted away so they develop mental defenses against other sets of tools as a rationalization of why they don't wanna lose the sunk cost It is both of those things, I think, and more. For me, at least in Elixir's case having come from Ruby, it is also that I am acutely aware that Elixir virtually eliminates entire classes of bugs that in some cases took me months to run down in Ruby.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s a SWE thing at all. Just bog standard human behavior. People like consistency. They hate change. If they get used to a specific tool or way of doing things, I’m pretty sure you’ll find similar behaviors. The key is time spent with a tool. I would expect if you took away an engineer’s favorite CAD software, even if it costs many thousands of dollars, you’d see a similar reaction. Would they be able to do their job with another tool? Certainly. Will you hear about it? Even more certain.

by Yoric 4y ago

namaria 4y ago

I'm endlessly fascinated by the strong opinions people in software develop about tooling. I never saw it with such intensity anywhere else... I'd like to get more into that someday. Maybe because we use these tools with our minds so it's a very intimate thing. Maybe because people find hard to learn a set of tools due to so much of foundational knowledge behind it having been abstracted away so they develop mental defenses against other sets of tools as a rationalization of why they don't wanna lose the sunk cost...

pmarreck 4y ago
> Maybe because we use these tools with our minds so it's a very intimate thing. Maybe because people find hard to learn a set of tools due to so much of foundational knowledge behind it having been abstracted away so they develop mental defenses against other sets of tools as a rationalization of why they don't wanna lose the sunk cost It is both of those things, I think, and more. For me, at least in Elixir's case having come from Ruby, it is also that I am acutely aware that Elixir virtually eliminates entire classes of bugs that in some cases took me months to run down in Ruby.
mynameisvlad 4y ago
I don’t think it’s a SWE thing at all. Just bog standard human behavior. People like consistency. They hate change. If they get used to a specific tool or way of doing things, I’m pretty sure you’ll find similar behaviors. The key is time spent with a tool. I would expect if you took away an engineer’s favorite CAD software, even if it costs many thousands of dollars, you’d see a similar reaction. Would they be able to do their job with another tool? Certainly. Will you hear about it? Even more certain.