I mean, isn’t that what “get on or get left behind” means?

It does not necessarily mean you’ll lose your job. Nor does “get on” mean you have to become a specialist on it.

The post picks specifically on things that didn’t catch on (or that only catched on for a period of time but were eventually superseeded), but does not apply it to other successful technologies.

Real programmers use C-x butterfly

But then you are not getting rid of the complexity, you are just forcing programs to become more complex/inefficient.

I experienced this with the doom libretro core, which is meant to be portable and have minimal dependencies… so if I need it to automatically find DOOM.WAD/ doom.wad/Doom.WAD/etc in a directory I would either have to add a globbing library as dependency to handle this case and have it fetch [Dd][Oo][Oo][Mm].[Ww][Aa][Dd], manually check for each possible case, or list the entire directory (I hope you don’t have a library of a million wads!) and compare each file (after upper/lower) just to find the one with the right name. And that could be a real pain for embedded devices with low I/O or if there’s a remote storage layer behind.

I’m with you, and not just from a “human” perspective. Also when writing small programs meant to be relatively lean/simple it can be a problem when the user expects it to find a particular file regardless of its case (will it be DOOM.WAD or doom.wad? Doom.wad? Doom.WAD? … guess it’ll have to be [Dd][Oo][Oo][Mm].[Ww][Aa][Dd] and import some globbing library as extra dependency… that, or list the whole directory regardless its size and lower/upper every single filename until you find a matching one…)

And if looking for Rust alternatives, there’s dua.

Particularly user friendly when called in interactive mode with dua i, you can navigate the tree immediately as it populates and calculates space progressively.