(2025-01-20) Theory vs. practice, again
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Today, I'm not gonna talk about anything specific in any depth, just some
random and short musings united with a common idea, rooted back in the
famous quote by Linus Torvalds: "Theory and practice sometimes clash. And
when that happens, theory loses. Every single time."
In theory, Forth and OCaml programming languages are much superior to Go and
Rust in every possible aspect, but in practice, most natively compiled
software is written in the latter ones nowadays. Even I, personally, would
prefer Go over other mainstream BS like Java or C++. By the way, in theory,
compiled languages are the go-to choice for almost any problem, but in
practice, interpreted (or at most JIT-compiled) languages are being used
much more on a daily basis.
In theory, Tcl/Tk is much easier to learn and get started with real everyday
desktop usage than Python, but in practice, Python has embraced literally
all areas of scripting while Tcl still remains in its niche. You want
desktop? Got Tkinter (ironically Tcl-based). You want peripherals? Got
pyaudio, pyserial and pyusb. You want client/server? Got tons of libraries.
You want AI? Got Pytorch, Tensorflow, Ollama, Langchain, Pydantic and other
integrations. I'm having a hard time now if I have to explain why it's
better to learn Tcl, when Python already has you covered everywhere, even on
MCUs like ESP8266EX.
In theory, Web should be only used for displaying static and, to some extent,
dynamic content, but in practice, Web has become another full-fledged
platform to run applications, and this fact has become so obvious that no
one can ignore it anymore. The quality and the level of user's control over
these applications is another thing.
In theory, there are plenty of mobile Linux distributions like postmarketOS
that are better than Android in every way, but in practice, it makes much
more sense for people to extend their Androids to achieve advanced Linux
functionality (e.g. with Termux or custom builds) than fully ditch the
ecosystem they got used to. In theory, "FOSS smartphones" would imply full
control over their components, but in practice, their evangelists go apeshit
with a simple question: "Does it even allow IMEI editing?"
In theory, if you pick up any non-Apple laptop except the cheapest ones,
provided that you install a normal OS instead of Faildows, you will get a
twice+ better performance per price ratio than any MacBook (not even to
mention their serviceability and upgradeability). In practice though, 90% of
laptops still are utter crap regardless of their price, and it is very hard
to find a decent alternative. I, for instance, have settled upon a ThinkPad
L14 Gen5, but just because there wasn't any real competition for that price.
The most interesting twist is, you have to know the theory well enough to
determine whether the practice is good or bad. The examples I've mentioned
are not as bad as most others. We just have to admit that we live in a world
of bad practices full of clueless people who don't even know how bad those
practices are because they didn't even bother to learn any theory. Can
anything be done about it? If you answer this question for yourselves,
you'll understand why this phlog even exists.
