Things I’ve changed my mind about

Here’s a small blog post to end 2022. I’ve put together a list of things I’ve changed my mind about over the past few years, since the epoch (covid). I’m likely to flesh out each of these in future posts.

Things I have a new appreciation for:

  1. Excel
  2. Rich Hickey
  3. Model checkers, TLA+
  4. Federation
  5. Kubernetes
  6. Email
  7. Alan Kay
  8. REST/Hypermedia
  9. Go
  10. RSS, blogging
  11. Error handling in Erlang
  12. Code vs data

Things I view more negatively:

  1. Product types (as opposed to record types)
  2. Static types, dependent types
  3. Haskell and Haskellers, Rust
  4. The cloud and SaaS
  5. Fat clients/ the SPA
  6. React
  7. macOS: it isn’t that great
  8. Open source, copyleft, GitHub
  9. “Performance is easy”
  10. Kubernetes (yaml)
  11. Modules
  12. Effect systems
  13. Twitter, and microblogging

New things I believe/in:

  1. Longevity in software
  2. Stability in packages
  3. Content Addressable Storage, Unison
  4. Conservativism
  5. Parsimony
  6. Common Lisp is valuable because it does everything it does, without ever changing or evolving.

Things I still believe/in:

  1. Emacs reigns supreme
  2. No-code isn’t good
  3. Nix is not ready yet