It's a bit like cutting wood. Cutting wood can feel terrible. You do it every day because you have to. Along the grain, in wet wood, with a handsaw.

And then, one day you discover the chainsaw, and the fact that you should cross cut.

Suddenly cutting wood no longer feels terrible, it's smooth, stuff works the way you expect. Your chainsaw turns out to have features for all kinds of wood and for many different kinds of joinery that you were hand carving before. It turns out that your chainsaw can be used to control an army of chainsaws without having to do anything at all. You just declare it to be so and it works.

Instead of focusing on your tools all day long you find yourself focusing on the thing that you are actually trying to solve. Where you needed 50 people before, now you need 5.

> X equals X plus one? That’s not math. That’s a lie.

That's really interesting... My wife, who has no real mathematical background had the EXACT same reaction when I was trying to teach her some simple programming. I tried to explain that equals in that context was more of a storage operator than a statement that said line is true. She found it very frustrating and we gave up on the endeavor shortly thereafter.

I've personally always had a soft spot for languages like TI-BASIC that use a storage operator rather than overloading = so for example:

X + 1 -> X

I wonder if I should try a functional language with her.

It's funny how HN goes through these Erlang cycles. It's a long standing tradition, starting off with 'Erlang Day': https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2009-03-11

Erlang gets a lot of stuff right for scalable web based stuff, and even though there are many of its influences that have by now made it into other languages and eco systems it is still amazing to me that such a well thought out system is run with such incredible modesty. You'll never see the people behind Erlang be confrontational or evangelists, they just do what they're good at and it is up to you whether you adopt it or not. And that is an interesting thing: the people that are good at this are writing code, not evangelizing. If I had to reboot my career I'd pick this eco system over anything else, it has incredible staying power, handles backwards compatibility issues with grace and has a community that you can be proud of joining. Modest, competent, and with a complete lack of drama.

Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complexity, more control, more distraction, more outrage, more engagement. Just keep building forever no matter the cost.