Figuring out the Mikado method was one of the bigger shocks of my career. I thought I already knew all this stuff, and of course once I saw it I could explain it all. But knowing something is true and seeing it first hand can be a very different experience.

The simpler solution is often hard to see. We get attached to the wrong details or suffer sunk cost fallacies.

When you switch languages the cost of porting is higher, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that you end up with something much simpler. And if the target language attracted you because it makes some part of the problem simpler, that’s important but maybe not the dominant contributing factor to the experience.