Software as a Reflection of Values with Bryan Cantrill

I love any talk that Bryan gives. The gist here seems to be that after the Node.js ecosystem favoring what he called approachability over his wishes to pursue reliability and expressiveness he had a long think and realized that each one is a worthy goal, but for different audiences and that there are always trade-offs across values.

This perspective, that programming languages have sort of cultural tradeoffs and you should make sure you are happy with those trade-offs seems obvious but it is not something I've heard anyone state before.

It also makes for an interesting way to examine the space of programming languages in general. It is a richer way to compare than the standard OO vs FP, and systems programming vs scripting, etc. Rust wants to be approachable, but their top level value is safety, so it will never be as approachable as javascript.