Underemployment for the last 3 years has given me a great opportunity to dive deeper into a lot of CS topics for things we use daily and read (or at least try to read) specs and code bases etc.

I’ve come to firmly believe that languages or other open source projects that get popular, usually do so for the things that are in its early versions.

For example, the HTTP 0.9 spec is like 1 page. UDP is like 3 pages.

I’d seen an article on HN recently (cant remember the name) that described this well. A language or what not starts simply and many jump on the bandwagon. Then starts adding incremental features, none of which are difficult to incrementally learn for existing users but the footprint of the product keeps expanding. C++, Javascript, Web APIs, graphics languages like OpenGL all are examples in my eye.

The fact that our system (broadly speaking) incentivizes inventing something ‘new’ rather than fixing or simplifying an existing something certainly exacerbates this.