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it's hard to gauge opportunity cost, since architectures fade in and out of popularity and patterns succeed where the frameworks that introduced them fail.It might be hard but it's also necessary. That's true for many other things that are hard.
What would the opposite be?
Have people adopting any new technology and losing several years of their lives studying a doomed fad because without evaluating its long term potential and opportunity cost because it's "hard" and "architectures fade in and out of popularity"?
Instead, we should encourage people to do the hard thing, and evaluate things that they intend to study and their opportunity cost before they devote any substantial time with them.
Some will still get it wrong and invest in the wrong tech, but overall doing due diligence before jumping in will be better than just blindly going for whatever catches their fancy or is hyped.
>I doubt Rob Pike and Ken Thompson would give up the experience of writing Plan 9; its lessons persist in Go and other systems they've designed.
That was their job and they were paid for it. And Plan9 was also their own creation and original research.
That's not the same as some third party devoting themselves to a new technology just because it looks cool, it's hyped at the moment, etc.