FIRST, CHOOSE YOUR FONT

One thing that I've tried to resist with computers is the seemingly 
near-universal obsession with minor variations in what I would call 
'equivalent abstractions'. The most direct example of this is 
programming languages. 'Knowing' a long list of programming 
languages seems to be the base material of computer geek cred, at 
least within certain circles. I'm not entirely sure what the 
definition is for 'knowing' a programming language anyway, and 
personally as someone who quickly forgets any skills that he 
doesn't use in about a year, it's kind-of unattainable by any 
definition, at least in any way that isn't quite unenjoyably strict.

But it also seems to be to be kind-of pointless. The language is, 
at the end of the day, purely an abstraction to be fed into the 
compiler. Once you find one serviceable language that works for 
you, can there really be so much gain for investing lots of time 
and energy into finding one that works better? The language 
shouldn't be defining the way your programs work in the first 
place, and it should have libraries for adding extra functionality 
that you don't want to implement yourself. It just seems to me like 
a waste of time. Personally I stick to Bash for scripting, C for 
performance, and PHP for web programming. In fact that last one may 
technically be surplus, and indeed I'm having to go through a 
re-learning phase for it whenever I need to work on my online-store 
code, because I've forgotten everything in the interveening months 
- C might have been a better choice if I'd picked out a good set of 
libraries to use (though I'd forget how they worked as well I 
suppose).

The same applies to why I haven't tried out any of the BSD OSs - at 
the end of the day so long as Linux has better hardware and 
software support it makes sense to pour effort into understanding 
all the details of it rather than confusing myself with two 
different means to the same end.

The same goes for desktop environments, and the controversial 
things like Systemd and Wayland. I don't object to people making 
alternatives if the existing solutions don't actually work for 
them, but the boundless enthusiasm of many computer types for 
exploring new ways to achieve the same basic hardware operations, 
with what are really tiny theoretical variations to the software or 
human interfaces above that level, often just seems silly.

As I see it, Linux vs BSD, C vs Go, Bash vs Python, it's little 
more purposeful than fussing over which font to use when writing 
code. If you can read the damn text then what does it matter? 
Actually I just remembered that I have seen long discussions about 
which font people use for writing code, so I guess such people do 
fuss over that too. Anyway personally I say just get on with it, 
forget the font and just bloody do something!

 - The Free Thinker