I have been looking at ways to simplify my software stacks while transitioning to “retirement.” For me this is often just pushing complexity to web infrastructure managed by corporations (but always with an easy migration path). Examples:
Lisp dev: I have been using Common Lisp for 40 years. I am eyeing more minimal languages like a Scheme implementation or Racket. I have flirted with the idea of Emacs Lisp but this would be a huge learning curve for me.
Deep learning, and general Python: I am a big fan of Google Colab. I haven’t powered up my at home GPU rig in months. For local Python dev, for little projects I have mostly moved away from PyCharm and VSCode, moving back to Emacs + python-mode.
When I must set up a web app, I am almost all in on GCP, sometimes Hetzner, never AWS for my own stuff.
I will probably drop programming languages that I don’t often use now like JavaScript, Haskell, Clojure, Smalltalk, and Java.
And yeah, as I talked to everyone for the article, it really seemed that minimalism was relative to where you were, and could often show up these days in using managed services. Such is the power of the cloud, right?
I didn't go there, but I think lots of things like serverless and edge workers and stuff like that could fit into this discussion as well.
“I might encourage minimalism in web development, but only because there's this incredibly complicated piece of software called a browser that has all this infrastructure baked into it that we can sit on top of. We can take advantage of that complexity and the abstraction it provides in a simple way, rather than putting a lot of complexity on top of that,” says Gross. “A lot of JavaScript projects take a browser and heap a bunch of incredibly complicated software on top without taking advantage of the infrastructure that the browser has sitting there.”
She is known for (rather intense) minimalism, and the saying "does it spark joy?" which you are supposed to use to filter out what things you should keep.
