Comment by drdaeman
9 months ago
> you need to make a strong up-front decision
Can one always realistically do so? I suspect the underlying unspoken assumption is that one must be ideally informed about all the possible potential pitfalls and gotchas they may face when using any given technology. Aka having a very good (ideally, perfect) knowledge of the technology and its surrounding ecosystem.
It wasn't just once or twice when I've picked some very promising library or tool only to learn something isn't exactly as I hoped (or as it was advertised - docs can lie, too) after I've already spent some non-negligible time implementing something with it. Save for some teenage keyboard mashing some decades ago I'm not a game developer, but I suspect this is universal experience no matter the niche.
> Developers often fall in the (2) camp but don't admit it.
There's also a mixed approach, where people admit "I want to build this thing and use this technology, and I suspect they're a potential good match so I'm gonna try both at the same time". Any even slightly creative person must have an urge to learn and explore new things, even if they aren't exactly necessary for a task at hand. Checking on the promise, if it holds true - sometimes it does and you get a new tech you love, quite frequently it doesn't and you have a bad day.
> Can one always realistically do so? I suspect the underlying unspoken assumption is that one must be ideally informed about all the possible potential pitfalls and gotchas they may face when using any given technology. Aka having a very good (ideally, perfect) knowledge of the technology and its surrounding ecosystem.
Exactly. You need to make some choices up front about program design despite rarely having enough information to make the correct decision, nor enough time to evaluate alternatives in detail. If we had known 15 years ago what we know now our then green field project wouldn't have been done this way - but we are still discovering things that the decisions we made 15 years ago are making hard to do today. That is on top of all the existing things we know are wrong that we often cannot feasibly correct.
You have to make choices. Some of those choices will be impossible to undo without starting over after a while. Some of the negatives will take a decade to figure out. There is no way anyone sane will give you enough time to figure out what those negatives are for each choice - even if the did you will be dead before you finish.