Kind of a big topic so I’m not sure where to focus.

A friend of mine has ADHD and we were talking about it. Specifically about why she always has dishes in her sink. She said what happens is she goes to do the dishes. She’ll wash one. Realize it’s the dish she had popcorn in, and she needs to clean the popcorn machine. She puts down the dish, and goes over to the popcorn machine. She goes to unplug it, and realizes the power strip it’s plugged into is kind of shitty. She’s looking up new power strips online, and no dishes are washed.

Contrary, I do my dishes. I wash one. I realize it’s the one I had popcorn in. I note I should clean that, too, later. I wash the next dish. I wash the next dish. I continue until the dishes are clean. I’m thinking about stuff but I’m still on task.

I don’t know if her experience is representative.

I hope you’re ready for a deluge of ignorant comments. And some malicious ones.

I’m going quickly enumerate some of the more common responses.

“I knew a poly couple and they broke up!” -> we’ve all known many monogamous relationships that ended, too. Though it is true that going from a conventional, deeply entangled, monogamous relationship to something else is challenging. Read about the missing step if you’re interested. Monogamous people would also benefit.

“It’s bad for the kids!” -> the poly people I know who have kids, the kids are doing great. They have more adults in their lives that are invested in them.

“It’s just cheating!” -> cheating is when you break agreed upon rules. If the rules don’t include “only have sex with one person”, then it’s not cheating to do otherwise.

“It’s just about sex!” -> sometimes! Sometimes monogamous relationships are just about sex. Sometimes they’re not.

“I’m too jealous for that!” -> most people experience jealousy. What’s important is how you deal with it. If you’re the kind of person who has a freak out and breaks into your partner’s phone because he smiled at the waitress, that’s not ok and not something to be proud of. You can and should work on emotional regulation.

“You poly people think you’re better than everyone!” -> some people might. But that’s true for any subcategory of people. Vegans. Linux users. City dwellers. Country dwellers. I will say that living unexamined choices I think is the worse choice. If monogamy is something you really thought about and chose, fine, good for you. But if you’re just doing it because that’s expected and never gave it a thought? Less impressed. The same for eating meat or using windows.

Ok, I think that’s all the highlights.

I realized zoom’s noise canceling or whatever is such that it doesn’t usually pick up on music playing in meetings. It’s usually doom (eg: spaceslug) or synth pop (eg: cold beat).

It really helps with long inefficient meetings.

You can also amend something you’ve just said. “oh I’m like almost done with that project” (pause for a beat, realize that’s a lie) “ok thinking about it for a second, more like half done.”

Work on saying the truth the first time, but in the interim don’t double down.

I am so far as I know neurotypical. I don’t have a ton of close friends, but of my four I think two have ADHD and two I think are neurotypical.

One of those close friends, I think the majority of their friends are neurodiverse.

I don’t have ADHD (so far as I know) and I also found finishing the final act a little difficult. There’s so much stuff! And the order you do things in kind of matters. And it has one of the hardest sequences (imo)

My parents fucked up a lot of things but I’m lucky they gave me pretty good food habits. There was no idle eating from boredom. You don’t have a snack if it’s almost dinner time. Chips are rare. Candy is basically holidays.

I know many adults who are like this. I think sometimes it’s executive dysfunction or ADHD or something.

I acknowledge this truce. I hope you find more enjoyable work.

How on earth did you bork your os? Were you running stuff with sudo?

But yes, you should install deps in a virtualenv, or use something like docker.

There are far more dead packages on npm than pip.

Why is having multiple different ways of declaring a function a good thing??

The standard in JavaScript for object declaration "is stupid*. It is a bad standard that is unintuitive and error prone. This has nothing to do with libraries. And JavaScript is notorious for "oh get a library for that*. Why do you think momentjs became mega popular? And momentjs is dead now! Move to datefns! The JavaScript ecosystem is full of that nonsense! Underscore got big because the standard library was kind of bad, but then people moved to lodash.

I don’t know what you’re responding to with point four. Honestly I don’t think you’re actually that familiar with python, and you ignored a lot of my points, so this probably isn’t a very fruitful conversation.

Really? You hate python but recommend typescript? All the problems you cited about python are there, too!

Garbage stack traces that go through a hundred lines of node modules.

Dependency hell. Peer deps. Npm or yarn? An ecosystem where packages have a half life of weeks. A new major version of node comes out literally every six months. SIX MONTHS. MAJOR VERSION CHANGE. And you complained about python2 vs 3!

Typescript also has a garbage debugger compared to python.

There’s also just too many ways of doing things because the standard lib is thin. How many ways to loop over an object are there? For in, for each, object keys, lodash, underscore, object.entries, what am I forgetting?

Newer versions have stuff in the standard lib like Array.at, but if you’re targeting an older browser that won’t work unless you enter the wonderful world of transpiling and polyfills. And you thought virtualenv was bad??

And let’s not forget the language’s obsession with being async, even when you don’t expect or want it. How many hours have been lost because someone forgot to await response.json()?

Oh right and remember how there’s like six ways of declaring a function. The function keyword, when it’s in a class, and like four variations on arrow function syntax. And arrow functions are different than ones with the function keyword.

And lots of other little weird gotchas like

const foo = "hello";
const bar = { foo: "world"};

Go on. What do you think that object key is? The syntax is insane . You need to do { [foo]: “world”} to reference a variable as a key. Which looks like a list. Because typescript/javascript is kind of bad.

Typescript is used in the browser because that’s the only thing really supported there for front ends. It’s a horrible tool for anything else.

Just use a virtual environment and let your ide manage it. Or a docker container if you’re doing production work.

Any language may have trouble if you willy-nilly rename things by hand. That’s not specific to python.

Almost every language has versions. Python’s is fairly stable. Python2 has been end of life for a few years now, and I don’t think there’s a python 4 even on the horizon.

Almost every language has dependency management. Use an IDE.

Use an IDE with refactor->rename. I’ve never had a problem with renaming. Right now when I went to see what it would do, it suggested correctly “did you mean [correct variable name]?”. But even without that it just says my class has no attribute with the incorrect name, which is about what I would expect. If you think these are bad error messages you should stay away from JavaScript.

Most languages running as admin can delete files. I don’t see how that’s a relevant critique of python.

It’s a widely supported language with comparably fewer gotchas and foot guns.

I’m the same way! My partner was surprised when we played a game together and I always knew where to go and they kept getting lost.

I think it’s because video games do a lot more useful sign posting than real life. Plus a mini map (in some games).