One of my favourite children’s stories is the Emperor’s New Clothes.

Two con-men sold an emperor some “new clothes”.

“But the clothes look invisible?” asked the king.

“They’re invisible only to idiots,” said the merchants, “but to the wise: they are beautiful!”

Nobody dared question the king, when he paraded naked before the entire country, for fear of looking stupid.

It took a child, to cry out: “but isn’t the King naked?” for the whole world to realise they had been cheated. In other words: new perspectives change the world.

New Perspectives Allow you to Innovate

Challenge the status quo: perhaps you will find a better way of doing things? But it comes at a cost:

• it takes energy (i.e. you must think)

• and you must innovate.

Both are good things.

Example: CSS vs Tailwind

It was canonical for stylesheets to be written separately….but why? I remember reading someone’s code and noticing that all the styles were written in-line. I asked and the author. He said: “oh yeah, I know it’s bad practice”… I never questioned it because I didn’t know any better, and had never tried anything different….but why is in-line styling such a bad thing?

Since then Adam Wathan realised tailwind css.

It looks a lot like writing styles in-line! Is it actually in-line? No. You are forced to choose between bg-red-100 and bg-red-200, but apart from that, it kinda is in-line. In other words: Wathan basically converted the entire world into styling in-line (sacrebleu)! Some people might wonder how they will ever go back to writing separate stylesheets! For them, life is an order of magnitude better …but here is the confusing part: that solution always existed, staring at them in the face - yet it was accepted that stylesheets were good, that in-line was bad, that stylesheets offered an effective “separation of concerns”….the entire world was effectively running around naked, and nobody really questioned it….but:

• How was it not immediately obvious?
• i.e. How did we fool ourselves, for so long, into doing things otherwise?

My answer:

• Because we never questioned the status quo.
• We didn’t do the work of creating an alternative solution.
• And we never gave that a shot.

Caveat:

(Some people like writing stylesheets. There is a place for them. But overwhelmingly, people have realised that writing styles in-line is not so bad.)

Summary

• If it’s cheap to do so - challenge the status quo!

You may come up with a solution that changes the world.