Complementary-Goods

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of economics-inspired solutions to otherwise hard problems. The other day I happened across an old post by GMU economist Bryan Caplan which I think does this very elegantly, for a problem of some interest to me. The vast majority of wills evenly divide the residuary estate between children. Mine evenly divides the residuary estate between (children and grandchildren). I like this a lot. It makes it unambiguously clear where your priorities in the case of your untimely demise lie....

Perl 5 went through a long nadir of unpopularity due in large part to its deserved “Write Once, Read Never” reputation. So I was surprised to find out not only is it installed by default on Debian, it’s installed nearly everywhere by default. It’s even the non-shell scripting language of choice on OpenBSD! Perhaps the only thing more impressive than Perl’s utter ubiquity is its longevity. The latest major version of Perl was first released in 1994....

Peanut butter and jelly are complementary goods, as are cars and gasoline, newer cars and electricity, electricity and basically everything else. We don’t normally think of, say, Docker and Kubernetes as complementary goods in software engineering, because you can get both for the low price of free. Or can you? You still have to invest time in learning both, and as the famous saying goes… Say it takes X hours to learn Docker adequately....