[dajonker]

A lot of us programmer folk are indefinitely in search of that one thing that will finally let us write the perfect, bug-free, high performance software. We take these concepts to the extreme and convince ourselves that it will absolutely work as long as we strictly do it the Right Way and only the Right Way. Then we try to convince to our fellow programmers that the Right Way will solve all of our problems and that it is the Only Way. It will be great, it will be grand, it will be amazing.

[rmunn]

A wise person once told me that if you ever find yourself saying "if only everyone would just do X...", then you should stop right there. Never, ever, in the history of the world has everyone done X. No matter how good an idea X is, there will always be some people who say "No, I'm going to do Y instead." Maybe they're stupid, maybe they're evil, maybe they're just ignorant... or maybe, just maybe, X was not the best thing for their particular needs and Y was actually better for them.

This is an important concept to keep in mind. It applies to programming, it applies to politics, it applies to nearly every situation you can think of. Any time you find yourself wishing that everyone would just do X and the world would be a better place, realize that that is never going to happen, and that some people will choose to do Y — and some of them will even be right to do so, because you do not (and cannot) know the specific needs of every human being on the planet, so X will not actually be right for some of them.