HTML .. when PostScript was way better.

The many years spent with C and C++ when there are better alternatives around.

Microsoft Windows, OSX, Linux when Plan9 exists.

OOP.

NoSQL and its total misunderstanding of the power of having a declarative query language.

Cache coherency, ordering guarantees, where we should opt for less.

I think you confused 'truth' with 'things jlouis likes better than others' --- to be fair, djikstra seemed to suffer from the same distortion.

Out of interest, have you written much interactive PostScript?

No, but they could've extended that instead of creating a new monster?

I've done a fair bit of development inside Postscript (way back when it was one of my favorite languages) and its problem in this context is that it /is/ a programming language, and one that would have to be effectively sandboxed. HTML on the other hand is purely a markup language, is extensible, can be reflowed, and is much more natural for writing documents by hand.

That keeping "up to date" on programming is not reading the latest blog posts on updates to Backbone.js, or learning yet another Web based *MVC or ANTI-MVC framework.

Not sure if this is strictly programming-related, but: Eschewing traditional career-track employment in favor of joining a startup can be damaging, and frequently does not break even with respect to the amount of money and influence you would gain working in a more traditional position.

PHP.

Nah, that's the one that's popular ("pleasant") to recognize.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd imagine Dijkstra would have a word or two to say about callbacks, given his famously strong beliefs about GOTOs....

Is there some uncomfortable truth about PHP that's not being shouted from the rooftops in every thread about PHP? If so, what is it?

Perhaps "Nothing else solves the deployment problem as well as PHP did."

(No, not even "git push to deploy".)