Lessons from a Can Opener

A master carpenter might be able to build a house with pointy shards of glass for nails, rotten wood for timber and pumice stones for hammers, but he's going to struggle every minute of the time, hate you for making him do it, probably decide to switch jobs half way through and the house is going to look like total shit (even if the only thing swapped out was the hammer this would likely become true). In my first job I had to deal with an absolute trash-heap of a proprietary programming language (Clarion, no, don't bother googling it, you will only find misleading marketing material and a bunch of people who only know Clarion, COBOL and FoxPro and will spend all day long telling you how Clarion is the best thing under the sun). Normally when dealing with a shitty tool, I will spend some time either replacing it or finding some way to modify it to make it less shitty, but in this case, there was nothing I could do but to master its endless quirks. I wrote anything I didn't absolutely have to write in Clarion secretly in other languages (usually Python) and presented it at the last minute when it was too late for anyone to say no to me doing it (yes it really is much easier to ask for forgiveness than permission). No, it wasn't the most sensible decision to use languages nobody else in the company knew to write important bits (although I tried to keep all my code as straightforward as possible), but at this point there was already another person in the company who had built up

Not really what you're asking for, but I saw this[0] a while back and it's made me actually think about can openers a bit now. You might find it interesting, too. [0] ▶ this video

I do think there's a reasonable argument for ads, since people don't always know what they could be looking for [1]. Independent magazines can serve a similar purpose, but the difference is between an organization that claims to be unaffiliated with the manufacturer, and needs to be constantly policed to make sure they aren't lying about it, and just being up-front about your affiliation, and only needing to be constantly policed to make sure you aren't lying about the product itself. Unfortunately, web ads suck. Because there isn't enough Gatekeeping(tm), I can't buy things from web ads, because the probability of it being a scam is too high. [1]: ▶ this video