if it takes me more than 30 minutes to learn how to use a piece of software then I do not want to use that software

and that’s why I only know Python

okay but more seriously, I care a lot about writing code that I find beautiful: the joy of writing code to me is about creating beauty

so I’m only interested in {tools/frameworks/architectural patterns/etc.} that facilitate elegant, beautiful code (in my subjective view of elegance and beauty). but I have no way of knowing if I’ll find them beautiful without spending a lot of time and energy deeply learning them, what problems they’re trying to solve, what philosophies they use to solve those problems, etc.

and I don’t really have the spoons or patience to spend those resources learning something highly technical on the gamble that I’ll end up liking [the thing]. also anything sufficiently complex or opinionated looks Very Ugly to me by default until/unless I learn that there are good reasons for it to be designed Like That

so that’s why my knowledge of technical things is so limited and why I like to write most stuff from scratch and invent my own best practices as I go

there are a few different technologies (languages, frameworks, etc.) that I’ve been interested in learning, because I think I might be able to find them beautiful eventually

but as soon as I start trying to learn them, the surface-level details that I learn immediately strike me as very ugly. probably just because I don’t understand the wider context for why they’re designed the way that they are. but I tend to be so put off by my initial distaste that I just give up on learning the whatever-it-is. I wish I could download full knowledge of the technology into my brain so that I could immediately know whether I like it or not, with full knowledge of what it’s trying to accomplish and why it’s designed the way that it is

anyway the things that I’m thinking of as I write this are:

• Model-View-Controller and its variations (MVC, MVVM, MVCVM)
• architectural patterns in general
• Lisp, Haskell, and F#
• Nix / NixOS