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You may have heard it said:
Javascript is a pretty good language if you stick to the good parts.
Depending on your personal tolerance for cleanliness - be it physical or conceptual - this quote may bother you. Why should you need to go out of your way to avoid bad features? Other programmers are going to use those bad features, mix with your code, and cause you problems. Language Foo certainly doesn't have or need feature Bar; why should you suffer its existence? Why can't you have tools that just work and have no blemishes?
Where is Utopia?
Unfortunately, there is no return to Eden. For every programming language you use for the rest of your life, there will be parts you don't agree with and will have to consciously avoid. But don't consider this a burden; you do this every day. The quote above is an appeal to subsetting. This is the idea that the world is a machine of many parts, not all of them relevant to you. Despite conceptual ideals, you are a real human alive today with a duty to live. But how should we even approach such a complex machine as life?
We must subset. This means:
Focusing today to reach tomorrow.
"Today" and "tomorrow" are metaphors; we need not obsess over time itself. To subset, we choose things that are relevant to us and our goals, and ignore the rest. Once ignored, we put them out of our minds. If we don't, we face choice paralysis and lingering doubt. These lead to an unsettled mind.
You've already picked a country to live in. You've chosen to a language to speak. You've committed to a religion (or not). You've selected a professional calling.
Let's think through some of these and see if we can polish our subsets.
Setting aside notions of the afterlife for a moment, religions provides us with a scope to interpret our surroundings and act on them. Chiefly they are a means to reach tomorrow despite the chaos of today. Theology itself is secondary.
Speaking of religion, the book The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs provides an interesting example of subsetting within religion itself. The author, by origin a secular Jew from the United States, spent a year doing his utmost to follow each and every rule he could identify within the Bible. This hardly starts and ends with the Ten Commandments; he identified several hundred such rules. He cross referenced stacks of translations of both Jewish and Christian sources, but still had to consult living experts from across the religious spectrum to finally hone in on what was expected.
During such expert interviews he came to a fascinating discovery - everyone is subsetting. No one group, no matter how "orthodox", was following all the rules. Everyone was picking their subset, perhaps stretching it in different ways, and moving on with life. It seemed sufficient that the groups were internally consistent.
This doesn't mean that religions are "false" because sects can't agree, but rather demonstrates that finding harmony among constraints is difficult. Groups living apart will naturally arrive at different subsets more applicable to their environment. Migrations shrink sets, but also grow them, inviting yet another eventual subsetting.
Does this sound familiar?
If we were to follow Rich Hickey's advice, we'd only ever accrete our APIs, never removing old functions, never reducing API surface area. Then we subset to the good parts. But if we only ever grow-then-subset, when do we get a chance to "really fix things" and remove all the old cruft? How long must we wait?
The answer is: until the revolution when we build the next language. And this happens all the time. In each case, it's an expression of the idea that "feature X was never really necessary".
cons cells.null.No programming language will last forever, so I don't think we should hold on to our favourites with too tight a grip. We grow them until we can't, and then instead of "just make a new namespace" as Rich would say, we make a new language entirely. We build a new world and live there until we no longer understand it.
If we assume that no one is coming to save us, then it's up to us to manage the lives we've been given. However, the default "everyday" is probably not the optimal subset for doing so. So we must consciously pick for ourselves. Let's ask ourselves:
Food:
Living:
Finance:
Tech:
Programming:
I suspect that the smaller the answers are, the simpler our lives will be, and the easier we can get on with the day.
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