Comment by joe_the_user

8 years ago

"You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing."

This is a great point. It has another corollary that people who are good X approach aren't necessarily good judges of whether approach X is good. The standard answer to "that seems like an excessively complex way to do it" is generally "that because you don't have experience with doing it the right way" and that could be right or it could be wrong. Often, the experienced and the inexperienced have about equal chance to guess on the meta-level whether this is true.

When OOP was the next big thing, a whole array of people defended against objections with arguments around those not liking it "doing it wrong", which we now, mostly, know were ridiculous right? Of course we know...