Fallthrough Worse Is Better
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Dec 25, 2025 Dive into the clash of ideologies between New Jersey's simplicity and MIT's pursuit of perfection. Discover how Go reflects this tension, with its pragmatic design choices and recent shifts towards correctness. The hosts explore the pitfalls of semantic versioning and the impact of idealism on electric vehicle adoption. They critique the trend of new languages that fail to solve real problems, advocating for a pragmatic approach that embraces practicality over idealism. Tune in for insights on dependency management and the future of programming.
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Two Competing Engineering Philosophies
- The MIT (correctness) vs New Jersey (simplicity) split frames trade-offs in design decisions like interfaces versus implementation.
- New Jersey favours pragmatic, shippable solutions while MIT pursues ideal correctness even at high complexity.
Interrupt Handling: A Tale Of Two Approaches
- Kris uses the interrupt-during-system-call example: MIT required 100+ pages of assembly to hide interrupts.
- New Jersey returned an error and asked the user to retry, enabling practical shipping (Unix/C won out).
Go's Pragmatic Roots
- Go's founders (Pike, Thompson) embedded New Jersey pragmatism into the language, explaining omissions like no exceptions or generics early on.
- This pragmatic minimalism helped Go gain adoption for cloud-native tooling.