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The Zone of Suck

Philosophically I have a tendency to “exclude the middle” and to dislike things that are the worst-of-both-worlds.

The phrase “The Zone of Suck” I first heard by an Apple fan in the netbook era who thought laptops were great when you were sitting down and smartphones were great when you were on the go while netbooks were never good.

Well, I don’t know about that specific example. Tablets weren’t around yet (since it was an Apple fanatic I'm sure he figured out a way to be a fan of tablets somehow, once Apple made one) and I never used netbooks so I can’t speak to how bad or good they were.

I didn’t save the post but I think he also had an analogy about apple pie. Those gross fast-food apple pie wrappers dunked in the French fries machine, he thought those were an OK thing for on the go, and nothing beats a real homebaked apple pie, and he was slagging a burger chain that tried some sorta compromise between them. I can’t speak for that example either since the first kind is not particularly good and I never tried that “compromise version” myself.

But the general principle I find applies to many cases where I do agree.

Often times when other people see a lagom Goldilocks sweetspot, I see a watered-down, unergonomic compromise.

This shines through in a lot of my tooling and libraries; I want tools that are comfy and dwimmy and magicky for the common things but that let you access the more robust and verbose and boring and complete solutions when you do need them. I’m OK with it being incredibly hacky and flaky because I know that the real thing is just around the corner waiting for me as soon as the chintzy stuff doesn’t cut it.

A lot of the bad syntax decisions we see in supposedly lightweight markup languages come from starting out with a low-feature, coarse-grained writing experience where you pretty much only needed to support paragraphs and emphasis and if you wanted more, you knew where to find it, but then those languages were extended in ways that really crammed things in where they didn’t really fit.

My friend Halo once said “Sandra, you always go for the overwrought super deluxe versions on Kickstarters” but it’s more like I’ve got an excluded-middle mentality. I’ll go for the super cheap black-and-white laser printed on scrap paper DIY proxy version with bottle caps and playing cards. Cheap, easy, low environmental impact. Or the deluxe version. For the ages.