>The utterly pervasive and constant feeling that a lot of people – way too many people – are really trying to invent these things from first principles and pretend like they were the first people to ever conceive of these ideas… it feels pretty miserable, all things considered. Going through life evaluating effectively no prior art in other languages, domains, C codebases as they exist today, just… anything.

Oh man, I hear ya. And in a lot more domains than computer language design. Is it inexperience? Impatience? The tendency for search results to be filled with low-quality and high-recency content? The prioritization of hot-take blog posts and Reddit comments over books?