what do you think of this image in relation to the work on FoC?

This pretty much summarizes the main counterpoint to evolution as it is clasically laid out.

I’ve been thinking lately that the major advances tend to look more like the first progression on the way to MVP (as they may involve a lot of pieces coming together) and then looks more like the later as it matures.

Yeah, the first sequence is definitely how it looks whenever I make something creative — and it took me a long time to learn that this is okay and normal. When you're writing a song, or making a video, or painting, or sculpting, it's usually going to look like total crap until the last 5% of the process. The trick is to be able to hold some vision or aspiration for the final form in your mind while working on something that is painfully unfinished.

Each "Like this!" image has a "Not like this..." image leading up to it.

In Greenwich they have a display of Harrison's series of clocks that he made to win the Longitude Prize. The issue they were trying to solve was keeping accurate time at sea. The specific issue that was causing trouble, was the rocking of a ship interfering with the pendulum of the clock. As you walk through the exhibition you see Harrison's clocks in turn, and can appreciate the iterative way in which he adjusted the design based on deploying in the real world. As you progress from the H1 to the H3 they basically get bigger and more complicated, and you can spot little additions and what issues they were put in to counteract (they are about 2ft high). Finally you get to the final cabinet, which houses H4 - the clock that finally actually solved the issue. It looks like a large pocketwatch, a few inches across.

sounds similar to the story of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacCready_Gossamer_Albatross

I love the spring vs pendulum example. Do folks here have thoughts on what sort of sidestepping (if any) their FoC projects involve? Even if you don’t have a particular spring in mind, do you have thoughts on what coding’s pendulums are (questions which need to be un-asked)?

not sure if so much as sidestep but instadeq (the new one), solves one problem by making the visual representation of the logic the only one (no textual representation used in any way). The other one is that it's sort of reactive/dataflowy but the ui doesn't show it as such, no need to be laying out cables or arranging stuff in 2d

Things like the Actor Model sidestep issues with concurrency (deadlocks etc)

Hest sidesteps any machinery needed to support debugging (eg: tracing, stack unwinding, compiler hooks, whatever) by.. making code execution happen slowly, and letting the programmer control just how fast they want it to happen.

In a work context, the biggest sidestep is making the client aware of complexity that they may not appreciate. For example, one special case out of 1,000 may seem a small thing but, of course, requires roughly the same development effort as if the special case applied to 999 out of 1,000 cases.