A well-optimized program is often a consequence of a deep understanding of the problem domain, good scoping, and mindfulness.
It often feels to me like we’ve gone far down the framework road, and frameworks create leaky abstractions. I think frameworks are often understood as saving time, simplifying, and offloading complexity. But they come with a commitment to align your program to the framework’s abstractions. That is a complicated commitment to make, with deep implications, that is hard to unwind.
Many frameworks can be made to solve any problem, which makes things worse. It invites the “when all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” mentality. The quickest route to a solution is no longer the straight path, but to make the appropriate incantations to direct the framework toward that solution, which necessarily becomes more abstract, more complex, and less efficient.
The main point of the framework is to keep developers interchangeable, and therefore suppress wages. All mature industries have things like this: practices that aren't "optimal" (in a very narrow sense), but being standardized means that through competition and economies of scale they are still cheaper than the alternative, better-in-theory solution.
I was on one of those robotics teams, and I recall this document being passed around as suggested reading on that team. It’s probably worth considering that this was written in 2000, when it was a more niche topic, and was probably itself a part of what made PID programming more accessible in the first place.
I mean, Control Theory has been part of engineering cirricula for a lot longer than that. But the internet wasn't nearly as pervasive then, and Wikipedia wouldn't be founded until the next year.
I second the “experimenting” thing. I would recommend going caffeine free for a couple weeks every once in a while, just to kind of… keep track of the addiction. I’ll quit coffee occasionally, historically usually for a tolerance break if it’s getting a bit too much, or to just kind of “reset” my brain chemistry.
I ultimately found that reducing was a good idea, but I personally like coffee a lot and feel it adds something for me. I also have adhd though, so I’m probably playing with a slightly different deck on the “how stimulants interact with the brain” front.
I have found that having controls and limits around caffeine intake is a pretty good practice. I found that to reliably sleep well, I need to never drink caffeine after noon. And reducing my intake a bit helps as well. But from there, I haven’t seen much further benefit from quitting entirely.
