https://x.com/_rygo6/status/1809346180650004992 I replied to this point mentioning my unshakeable belief in what I am doing, and it occurred to me that there aren't actually many on this FoC Slack who can equally say that they know exactly what they are certain is right for the Future of (Programming)! We get a lot of speculative and experimental thoughts here which is the reason we all engage, but who amongst you can say you are 110% certain you've found what you believe to be the Future, with the uncertainty only being in "whenever that comes about"? Which of course, as the Twitter thread mentions, is about the seemingly trivial but of course 110% important factor of "memeing" to the Internet. Personally, I'm crap at that bit.

I can! 👋🏼 That’s how I’ve had so many interesting conversations here. It’s a lovely reality check that other people who feel this way disagree with my vision. :)

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Hi @Stefan can you explain this in this context?

Bias statement: I am not good at certainty, no matter which topic. That said, I am particuarly reluctant to attribute any certainty to ideas about the future of programming because that future will be determined by lots of forces: technical, social, political, environmental, etc. Unless you are considering the very near future (say, five years from now), I find it hard to be certain about anything.

@Duncan Cragg I’m just trying to be funny and thought throwing a reference to Dunning-Kruger (in meme-form!) into this thread would provide some… entertainment. @Konrad Hinsen demonstrates it well. The people I know who are brilliant at what they do and have all the competency to be confident about, would never claim that they are certain about anything. And from my own experience I can only say that I’m beginning to understand how you get more and more uncertain, the deeper you dig and the more you realize how much more there is you don’t know enough about.

I’m not entertained by being made the butt of jokes about Dunning-Kruger and “Peak of Mount Stupid”.

@alltom don't take it personally, if you're like me with off-the-scale hubris, you'll assume that you're up on that plateau there!

@alltom Look, what do I know? I have no idea what you’re working on. Any of us could potentially make some commit to GitHub tomorrow and change the world. If you feel confident that you’re on a good path, then good for you. And I see no reason why you couldn’t have put all the effort in to have made it way past the slope of enlightenment. Just thought it would be useful to be aware of this effect, not necessarily to place yourself on that diagram (which technically isn’t correctly representing the actual theory; that’s why I called it meme), but to realize how confidence may come across to other people familiar with it. Could I have gotten this across in a better way? For sure. I apologize for my tasteless attempt to make this point.

Thanks, it’s all good. 👍🏼 DMs with you were some of the memorable ones I mentioned.

Me too! And I’d like to think that these statements are less about shapes of things to chase for and more about values people here already have and share. No future predictions needed. You value moldable programming environments? Me too. You believe accessibility is important? Me too. You think games are getting some things right? Me too. We already share those beliefs. Here. Today. Not everything has to be looked at as results we want to achieve. Sometimes it’s good to share values and explore from there. Enjoying the process. Together.

There is a project where I know very precisely what I want to build [though it's a good bet that'll shift as I actually work on it...] but very uncertain if >1 are gonna adopt it 🤷‍♂️ I'm pretty certain there are dozens of people who'll find it interesting & provocative :-). I've reached the point where "I have to build this because noone else will".

@Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin That's my situation as well. Which is why having fun along the way is an important implementation criterion for me. A bit like a "no regrets" insurance.

Just finished re-reading John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity. This is the last page in the book. Thought it fit well here, in particular the part about insecurity.

I am pretty good at knowing what I know but pretty terrible at knowing what I don't know and pretty average at evaluating the value of things outside my experience

I'm certain that the Future of (Programming!) will have a plurality of approaches. I'm certain that something like what I'm working on (#allinonnodeandwire) belongs in the pantheon but there's so much more work to do on it to make it good-ish! I'm certain that to invest the necessary long-term effort in improving it, we must convince ourselves that it's "commercially viable" (in quotes because see #C5T9GPWFL giant thread on personal manifestos for convivial economics)

@Duncan Cragg The firm beliefs I have often prevent me from seeing a deeper truth. The brain is good at tricking itself into thinking it’s right about what it knows to be the truth, and this is actually useful! We need to believe 110% that a stick in the grass is a snake, in order to keep us alive the 10% of the time it is actually a snake that will bite us. Knowing this, I try to keep open the possibility that everything I believe in any given moment may not be totally accurate. All I really know for sure is that “knowing” is a state of mind that has a very strong grip at times, and loosening that grip tends to be helpful to me getting more of what I want.

@Jim Kring Hi! I think there are actually at least two quite distinct levels of this space, for me at least, where one level carries the 110% certainty and stability that I've been talking about, and the other changes literally on a weekly or two-weekly basis and represents insane levels of volatility! This is my life. To bring that down to an example without talking about my own work, imagine you're TBL and have invented the Web. You carry through your life this vision and mental model of a single global fabric of interconnected human knowledge. Nothing can shake that from you or upset your 110% belief in the value of that. But do you just start by implementing a contacts database for CERN? Do you integrate with FTP this week, but move on to 2D graphics the next? Why would anyone need 2D when 1D text is universal? Ah, but here's SGML, and here's SMTP and MIME media types, and shouldn't there be some object method stuff in there that's all the trend these days? NeXT seems cool. Everyone should be able to edit web pages! That's obvious, but, let's just get some static publishing stuff out first... Later, along comes someone called Fielding to tell you what you were talking about all along, at least in terms of abstract architecture, but were too in the weeds to see it - you just felt your way through the choices guided by this deep certainty and innate vision. That's my life: unshakeable certainty about the broad architectural goals and vision, but weekly changing how I'm going to manifest it.