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by samcodes 2200 days ago
I think software engineering is depressingly, suboptimally stable. The space of all possible ways to write programs is so, so large and almost completely unexplored. Lisps, Hindley-Milner type systems, Cox, neural networks with autodifferentiation ... whenever we substantially depart from the local optima around C-like programming, we find cool shit.

However, the vast majority of programming is done to build nearly indistinguishable CRUD SaaS apps. If we could just spend half our time doing real, interesting exploration of programming-space to satisfy our curiosity, maybe we could all agree to build apps with a more boring tech stack. However, that would require a large scale change in incentives that is hard to imagine shy of a Space Race style event.

... or Jonathan Blow was right and C was more or less the global max, and everything else was a mistake. I really hope that isn’t the case.