Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

2. React and Typescript

3. Jetbrains IDEs

It's telling that comments like this inevitably involve Rails, not plain Ruby.

Rails's "magick" is obfuscatory and at times counter-intuitive. Ruby, the language, is pretty straightforward. I wish more people spent time playing with Ruby before diving into Rails.

- The free/libre/open source community care deeply about fundamental problems of our society and are trying to provide legal and technical tools to help take steps to create a better world. When I was younger, I thought "suckers! They're giving their compiler away for free!" It took me a while to internalize the free software ideals and even longer to be an active proponent.

- Corporate software, especially Microsoft, is in the business of creating a walled ecosystem, charging end consumers for their product and charging software developers to be part of that ecosystem. The first 'a-ha' moment was when I realized they, and others like them, were a racket, or at least trying to be one. The later 'a-ha' moment was when I realized there was a viable alternative to this game.

- Most (but not all) computer programming language flame wars about which language is better boil down to whether the developer prioritizes speed of program execution or speed of program development. See [1]. Newer language wars center of safety and bug creation, so maybe this point is dating me.

- Programming languages are more about human psychology than about some mathematical proof of correctness. Programming languages are designed as a compromise between how a computer needs to be told to operate and how humans communicate. All the theoretical and mathematical infrastructure around language design are there to justify decisions once the language has passed the "psychology" test. This is the same idea between JPEG, MP3, etc. compression. Fourier transforms and wavelet transforms don't inherently create a saving, it's only when we can throw away higher order coefficients because the human perceptual system isn't as sensitive to them as lower order coefficients, does it give benefit. That is, JPEG and MP3 are specifically tailored to the human perceptual system. The math is there as the building block but which bits/coefficients to throw away are determined empirically. To belabor this point a bit more, programming language discussions arguing over functional vs. imperative, type safety, etc. that don't try to determine measurable metrics of success, preferably through testing their hypothesis with data collected on actual usage, are expressing an opinion only.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200407014302/http://blog.gmarc...