Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

Interpret everything. Perl, Tcl, irb, groovy on the desktop.

On the iphone, only BASIC. :-)

"Just Run, Baby."

I would say that working as a programmer in a corporate environment is a bit similar to being paid to be a novel writer by people who don't know how to read, but absolutely want to tell you how to do your job properly.

Is this an unpopular opinion?

- 90% of abstraction is dreadful. That means _your_ particular abstraction is almost certainly bad, and we don't want to learn it.

- There is a lack of respect for the history of programming. IMO it has caused the industry to be stuck in a perpetual cycle of half-baked rediscovery.

- Similarly, a type of "FAANG-syndrome" exists and allows sub-par ideas to take over mind share of the industry. Once a technology picks up enough momentum, it will snowball and we're stuck working with legacy trash almost immediately. Developers legitimately seem to believe each trend is good.

- Our industry's shared vocabulary is too weakly defined. Phrases like "The right tool for the job" are ubiquitous but essentially meaningless and used as a form of shorthand "I currently feel this is correct". If we had a real professional lexicon, the first thing juniors would learn would be to enumerate reasoning to a precise degree. IME most "senior" devs can barely do it.