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by throwawaymaths 1343 days ago
It's also wrong to say that tools don't matter. If you say try to shove async and multiprocessing python into a system because python is boring and tools don't matter you are going to get absolutely fucked in terms of maintainability. Maybe you can afford that (and many startups can) but there's going to be a lot of survivorship bias that is sourced from non-technical things like "founder had connections" that are not reproducible across to another startup
1 comments

This.

In my experience, people that insist in never adding new things can only afford to do that because they push all of the flashy problems their "boring" options create onto somebody else. And that somebody else tends to be severely underrated because they lose all their time fixing the crazy problems that come from ignoring tool selection.

But also, people that insist on novelty all the time usually can only afford to to that because they abandon their code as soon as the complexity of joining all new pieces together starts to appear. Usually leaving it for somebody else to deal with.

As a rule, developers that always choose X, for almost any X create many more problems than they solve. But they do make great strawmen to fight against in HN comments. As soon as you see people equating them to the technique, you can know the comment is worthless.