The State of the Art is Terrible

Having competition made them both stronger, no doubt.

This is the 'little death.' Allow me to relate an anecdote.

I grew up loving computers, loving everything about them, how they were built, how they were programmed, how they did what they did. I started out just as the 'personal computer' revolution was getting started, it was glorious, Altair, IMSAI, SOL20, Heathkit. Lots of folks with their own take on what the PC should be. I have spent hours and hours and hours writing my own BIOS code, hacking ZCPR3, making an emacs clone work on CP/M, falling in love with the Amiga and suffering the incurable disease of incompetent management. By the time the late 90's rolled around I was starting to burn out. A lot of stupid things which didn't have to be that way, Microsoft always trying to make their version of something just a bit incompatible and only buildable with their tools. Etc. I was writing some code on a windows box and hating it. I yearned for a simple 'make foo'.

Then I met a 'kid' who was building stuff on Windows and he had the same wonder I had when I was that age, except he didn't complain about visual studio crap because he had been introduced to computers with this as the way to do it. Where I saw re-implementations of the wheel, done poorly, he didn't see anything, they were just the tools you had to use to get to the end point.

I realized with a start that I had lost my sense of 'wonder.' That childlike state where you ignore the fact that something is uncomfortable or irritating because you have so much amazement over the thing itself. And the truth is that if you use crappy tools for a while your muscle memory will figure out how to minimize the irritation. I looked around and saw that people I knew, people who were bright lights of leadership back in the day, were now stuck in an endless cycle of curmudgeonly rant because they too had lost their sense of wonder. I decided to start picking my battles more carefully. (which you can do in a hobby, not so much at work)

I found an editor that I could use everywhere (Visual Slick Edit, now VIM) so that I could have the same editing experience on all my platforms. I spent some time to understand the build system (make, gcc, java, python, etc) to get to a point where not only could I create my own environment I could keep it running across platforms, and began to develop my own set of APIs which I could link through into the underlying platform. The goal was reduce the friction between getting stuff done, and the tools to get things done. I recognized the reward comes in the running of the code and getting it to work as I wanted.

Then I can mostly ignore the crappy stuff. I can joke about how putting a character on screen used to be to monitor the transmitter buffer empty (TBE) flag on the serial port and then write the ASCII character when that flag was 'true', to something which spends thousands of cycles checking to see if this time I want my characters to go right to left, or which code points or font I should use to display them, or how they should be alpha blended into the background of what is on a screen somewhere. And when I come across something that is horribly, horribly broken like using WebCam's in Linux, I try to develop a durable API for talking to video which isn't cumbersome to use, or has feature stubs I'll be unlikely to use. I try to stay amazed that I can capture digitally on a piece of $20 hardware that which used to cost thousands, and in so doing keep my sense of wonder about what is possible.

It's not a fact, it's a number he pulled out of his ass.

He never made it about deliberate practice, he used the Beatles jamming and fucking around for 10,000 hours as an example.

Stop talking about 10,000 hours IT'S BULLSHIT. You might was replace-string it with "SIX-SIGMA CERTIFICATION", it means nothing!

Would you also say that there probably couldn't exist a significantly better OS than Mac, Windows, or Linux, or else we'd know about it? I admit "better" can be hard to define; what would make a 10x better car, or IP protocol, for example? It strains the imagination, because what makes these things "good" is complicated. But ask anyone who was around during the early proliferation of computer architectures and operating systems, and they will tell you that what ended up winning out is markedly inferior to other things that could have been. Paths get chosen, decisions get made, billion-dollar fabs get built. The market doesn't pick the best technology.

It's like web standards -- accept them, but only defend them to a point. We may be stuck with CSS, but that doesn't mean it's any good or that it succeeded on its merits.