alt Hacker NewsAnother important skill in this area, or maybe it's a personality trait: Being able to tell yourself that taste is actually really important. You have to kind of double down on following ideas to their extreme, or something like that. Or maybe taking very subtle emotions very seriously.
Most of the time when you chase taste you are working on splitting hairs. Or it will look like that to an outside observer.
An uncomfortable thing about skill, taste, and experience is that it’s often easier to demonstrate the superiority of one path over another than it is to explain the differences in a way the audience is prepared to absorb.
I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.