This post is part of a series, starting at Reflections on a decade of coding.
This is one of my favorite questions to ask people: what are some things that you used to strongly believe but have now changed your mind about?
I want to focus especially on ideas that I wasted a lot of time on, or that got in the way of success.
Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.
[...] the only programmers in a position to see all the differences in power between the various languages are those who understand the most powerful one. You can't trust the opinions of the others, because of the Blub paradox: they're satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs.
[...] clearly revolutionizes software as most know it. It could lead to efficient, reliable applications. But that won't happen. A mainstay of our economy is the employment of programmers. A winnowing by factor 100 is in no one's interest. Not the programmers, the companies, the government. To keep those programmers busy requires clumsy languages and bugs to chase.
[...] the reason we are facing bugs that kill people and lose fortunes, the reason that we are facing a software apocalypse, is that too many programmers think that schedule pressure makes it OK to do a half-assed job.
It's easy to find examples of this idea, that everyone is doing computers completely wrong and that there exist simple solutions (and often that everyone else is just too lazy/stupid/greedy/immoral to adopt them).
X is amazing, so why isn't everyone using it? They must be too lazy to learn new things. Y is such a mess, why didn't they just build something simple and elegant instead. They must just be corporate jobsworths who don't care about quality. Why are all those researchers excited about Z? They just don't understand what the real world is like from up in their ivory tower.
It's not limited to programming, of course:
Instead of losing faith in the power of government to work miracles, people believed that government could and should be working miracles, but that the specific people in power at the time were too corrupt and stupid to press the "CAUSE MIRACLE" button which they definitely had and which definitely would have worked. And so the outrage, the protests - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!
-- Book review: the revolt of the public
It's so easy to think that simple solutions exist. But if you look at the history of ideas that actually worked, they tend to only be simple from a distance. The closer you get, the more you notice that the working idea is surrounding by a huge number of almost identical ideas that don't work.
Take bicycles, for example. They seem simple and obvious, but it took two centuries to figure out all the details and most people today can't actually locate the working idea amongst it's neighbours.
Even when old niche ideas make a comeback (eg neural networks) it's not because they were right all along but because someone recognized the limitations and found a new variation on the idea that overcame them (eg deep learning).
I imagine some fans of the penny farthing groused about how everyone else was just too lazy or cowardly to ride them. But widespread adoption of bicycles didn't come from some general upswelling of moral fortitude. It came from someone figuring out a design that was less prone to firing the rider into the ground headfirst whenever they hit a bump.
Finding the idea that actually works amidst the sea of very similar ideas that don't work requires staying curious long enough to encounter the fine-grained detail of reality and humble enough to recognize and learn from each failure.
It's ok to think that things have flaws or could be improved. But it's a trap to believe that solutions are trivial and everyone else is just too enfeebled of character to push the miracle button.
I learned this the hard way at Eve. Starting from my very earliest writing about it there was a pervading idea that we were going to revolutionize everything all at once. It took me two years to gradually realize that we were just hopping from one superficial idea to another without making any progress on the fundamental problems.