2024-06-15 00:08 UTC
@polotek@social.polotek.net I think it helps to imagine, in the spirit of spherical cow in a total vacuum, the ideal transpiler and build setup. It:
- never prevents you from adopting the latest features of the underlying platform and imposes no costs for doing so
- takes no time above and beyond `ctrl-r`
- creates no debugging challenges
- is 100% understood by everyone in your org
Now recall these tools are somewhat imperfect in reality, and their imperfections generate multiplicative (not additive) error.
Replies (1)
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@slightlyoff@toot.cafe 2024-06-15 00:11
@polotek@social.polotek.net Under this understanding, we can clearly see that these systems act as not just as accelerants for adoption of new things, but dampers as well. Underlying syntax and semantics drift over time, and each of these tools present an ongoing cost for keeping up with that change. The taller the stack, the more they cost in opportunity *and* inner-loop development *and *in debugging overhead.