A long time ago on HN, I said that I didn't like complex numbers, and people jumped all over my case. Today I don't think that there's anything wrong with them, I just get a code smell from them because I don't know if there's a more fundamental way of handling placeholder variables.

I get the same feeling when I think about monads, futures/promises, reactive programming that doesn't seem to actually watch variables (React.. cough), Rust's borrow checker existing when we have copy-on-write, that there's no realtime garbage collection algorithm that's been proven to be fundamental (like Paxos and Raft were for distributed consensus), having so many types of interprocess communication instead of just optimizing streams and state transfer, having a myriad of GPU frameworks like Vulkan/Metal/DirectX without MIMD multicore processors to provide bare-metal access to the underlying SIMD matrix math, I could go on forever.

I can talk about why tau is superior to pi (and what a tragedy it is that it's too late to rewrite textbooks) but I have nothing to offer in place of i. I can, and have, said a lot about the unfortunate state of computer science though: that internet lottery winners pulled up the ladder behind them rather than fixing fundamental problems to alleviate struggle.

I wonder if any of this is at play in mathematics. It sure seems like a lot of innovation comes from people effectively living in their parents' basements, while institutions have seemingly unlimited budgets to reinforce the status quo..