I totally get what you're saying, I guess I just have different values (for lack of a better term) where this stuff is concerned. My ideal job would have me bouncing between different operating systems, hardware, and languages all the time. For career reasons, and just to feed my curiosity, I have a fear of getting too comfortable with any one workflow/language/OS/etc. Plus familiarity breeds contempt- every time I thought I found the perfect anything, it was only because I hadn't been using it long enough to hit any of the pain points.
I've come to feel really strongly that there is no one right answer when it comes to those things. Sometimes there are wrong answers (I wouldn't write a word processor for a desktop OS in assembly if I didn't have to), but rarely is there ever one right answer, and there's usually something to be learned from all of the viable alternatives. If I get too used to one particular environment, to the point where I refuse to use anything other than that one environment, then I would feel like I was missing out on a lot of cool stuff by ignoring the rest of the computing world.
The other side of it is that I've also come to feel really strongly that a lot of the tweaks and optimizations that people swear by and obsess over with (for example) their editor configs aren't actually improving efficiency. When I've gotten into deep configuration and automation and optimally efficient usage of vim or emacs, it felt like I was more efficient, but in hindsight I don't think I actually was. I might've saved a few keystrokes here and there, but at most the extra keystrokes I shaved off were annoyances, and not meaningful impediments to my efficiency. I spent so much more time learning how to shave off those few keystrokes that it's unlikely that I'll ever get it back via repeated usage of what I learned.
That's just me though, everybody's got different motivations for why they do what they do. I would like to think that all of the above comes from hard-earned experience, but it's just as likely to be my own preferences and values. When you get super old like me, you get to pass off your personal preferences as genuine wisdom learned the hard way over many long years. :)
- What I said in my previous comment in no way applies to programming languages. It applies to my programming environment. I very much enjoy using different kinds of languages. (There are definitely some that I dislike and stay away from though.)
- I do not think I've found the perfect anything or "the one right answer." I continue to improve my setup. I have spent more years in Windows than in Linux, so I am aware of what I'm missing in that regard. My tactic is not to remain static; it is to iteratively improve. So far, it has lead me deeper and deeper into the terminal. (My next big task is migrating email into the console. It is a task so daunting and terrifying that I've procrastinated on it for years.)
- I very strongly disagree with your disconnect between annoyance and efficiency. If I'm getting annoyed, then my emotional state is an impediment to focusing and working productively. Drudgery is annoying and frustrating and error prone. I don't really swear by any particular config as some Universal Truth, but I do have strong opinions about what works well for me. And I will spend an exuberant amount of time fixing it, especially if there is an engineering challenge involved (because, why not, we're hackers and it's fun to do that stuff). If the only thing you think you gained is "saving a few key strokes," then I agree that it probably isn't a useful tweak in most cases. What I gain by tweaking is compartmentalization and automation, and they usually pay for themselves in due time.
- Haha yes, I'm not quite old yet, but I've been at it for over a decade at this point. So not exactly a fresh lamb either. :-)
Excuses for the off-topic question, but would you be willing to share your imdb scraper? That would be very useful to me. (My contact data is in my user profile.)
I've come to feel really strongly that there is no one right answer when it comes to those things. Sometimes there are wrong answers (I wouldn't write a word processor for a desktop OS in assembly if I didn't have to), but rarely is there ever one right answer, and there's usually something to be learned from all of the viable alternatives. If I get too used to one particular environment, to the point where I refuse to use anything other than that one environment, then I would feel like I was missing out on a lot of cool stuff by ignoring the rest of the computing world.
The other side of it is that I've also come to feel really strongly that a lot of the tweaks and optimizations that people swear by and obsess over with (for example) their editor configs aren't actually improving efficiency. When I've gotten into deep configuration and automation and optimally efficient usage of vim or emacs, it felt like I was more efficient, but in hindsight I don't think I actually was. I might've saved a few keystrokes here and there, but at most the extra keystrokes I shaved off were annoyances, and not meaningful impediments to my efficiency. I spent so much more time learning how to shave off those few keystrokes that it's unlikely that I'll ever get it back via repeated usage of what I learned.
That's just me though, everybody's got different motivations for why they do what they do. I would like to think that all of the above comes from hard-earned experience, but it's just as likely to be my own preferences and values. When you get super old like me, you get to pass off your personal preferences as genuine wisdom learned the hard way over many long years. :)