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Re:Ask HN: Why do such strong opinions exist in our industry? by AnimalMuppet on Sunday August 11, 2019 @09:32PM (#20671741)
There's too much going on in this industry. Nobody knows everything. When a question comes up (Angular vs React? Lisp vs Haskell? C++ vs Rust?), there are very few people who know both sides really thoroughly, even for a question that only has two sides. So we wind up with opinions, because nobody knows enough to do otherwise.

And if you don't know both sides, you're judging a side that you know less well against a side that you know better. That is, you're judging your experience of X against your opinion of Y. When you're talking to someone who knows Y better than X, you can get fireworks.

Re:Ask HN: Why do such strong opinions exist in our industry? by devxpy on Monday August 12, 2019 @03:19AM (#20673196)
Hmm, so are you blaming the incompetence of the majority of people in the field?

Also, I can't help but draw parallels to this other discussion [1] where people claim that veterans in the programming community have to "live" with python because beginners adore the syntax.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20672051

Re:Ask HN: Why do such strong opinions exist in our industry? by thethirdone on Monday August 12, 2019 @04:41AM (#20673621)
> Hmm, so are you blaming the incompetence of the majority of people in the field?

I interpreted it as being an issue that there are so many options that being an expert in the relevant two so you can can make an educated decision is uncommon.

This is probably somewhat unique to programming. There are easily more than 25 programming languages that would be important to know trade-offs between in any given programmer's career. And in each, there are competing libraries and frameworks. Woodworking is the only other profession that comes to mind for having so many competing tools.

Re:Ask HN: Why do such strong opinions exist in our industry? by AnimalMuppet on Monday August 12, 2019 @11:16AM (#20676172)
No. I'm blaming the size of the field.

Do you thoroughly know all the web frameworks? Does anyone? No.

Do you thoroughly know all the major languages? Does anyone? No.

Is that because everyone is incompetent? No.

As an analogy, there was a time when a "renaissance man" could know much of the world's (or at least Europe's) knowledge. Then, in the late 1800s, there was a time when one person could pretty thoroughly know most of physics. Those days are over. Physics is too big. Even the best people know one area deeply, and nearby areas fairly well, and are sort of familiar with the rest of the areas.

So it is with programming. It's too big to really know it all. You can't. Nobody can.