Don’t be a technical masochist  There’s an old joke from Henny
Youngman:   Sometimes tech choices are that easy: if something
is too hard, stop doing it. A great deal of pain comes from
using a tool outside its intended use, and often that’s
avoidable.  For example, when regular expressions get too hard,
I stop using regular expressions and write a little procedural
code. Or when Python is too slow, I try some simple ways of
speeding it up, and if that’s not good enough I switch from
Python to C++. If something is too hard to do in Windows, I’ll
do it in Linux, and vice versa.  Sometimes there’s not a better
tool available and you just have to slog through with what you
have. And sometimes you don’t have the freedom to use a better
tool even though one is available. But a lot of technical pain
is self-imposed. If you keep breaking your leg somewhere, stop
going there.  11 thoughts on “Don’t be a technical masochist
1. John:      I pretty much agree. But . . . sometimes the
effort spent overcoming a problem