Blub Paradox (#134)
This post is about programming languages and mashed potatoes. It’s a little bit related to fact #124 about the Gell-Man amnesia.
The Blub Paradox originates from an essay of programmer Paul Graham1. It describes a phenomenon in coding, where people usually prefer a certain (middle-range) programming language and are reluctant to accept, that there are better options. He invents an imaginary programming language called Blub. Programmers can easily look at a language less potent than Blub and identify it as being inferior. But when they look up to a more powerful language, they're often not aware, that they're looking "up". They don't recognize the potential benefits and are more like: "Ok, that's just like Blub but with some additional unnecessary features."
The Blub Paradox is basically the fact, that we can always look down (or back), and see what's wrong or missing, but often when we look up, we don't see the bigger/better picture.
Let me generalize this phenomenon and give you a trivial example: Mashed potatoes. You can get mashed potatoes as an instant meal, add milk, done. You can however make them from scratch: Cook, mash, mix with milk. I think many would agree, home-made tastes better. Many would say: “I make some pretty good mashed potatoes."
But then, you could also go all the way, Bocuse-style: Start cooking the potatoes in cold water to modify the starch, peel them when hot, swizzle them in the hot pan to evaoprate some moisture, mash twice with a passe-vite, add milk gradually, mix between every addition and in the end add what feels like an insanely amount of butter. This will get you some really delicious mashed potatoes.
But in the end, most of us would just frown at all the fuzz and be like: "Ah, my average blub mashed potatoes are just as good." That’s the Blub Paradox.
Enough bla about blub. Now I'm hungry.
Delicieux!