I basically feel the same way. In a way it is very liberating. All of those esoteric languages that were on my ever-growing todo list are now things I can let go of. Ultimately we have to ask ourselves how we want to spend our time, and now it is much harder to justify spending countless hours studying one programming language after another. We still can, of course, but we are now more "free" to do other things instead.
It's sort of sad, but really I think it is a weight off my shoulders.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. What keeps me on mac, however, is the hardware seems so much better than the alternatives. I'd love a macbook quality linux laptop.
I agree. I once attempted this on a javascript project (a personal project, not at work), after reading about APL/J/K people and their philosophy. My constraint was: I should never have to scroll. I also aimed to have as few files as possible.
The result was surprisingly pleasant, and it changed how I feel about this sort of thing. I think the Clean Code approach makes a lot of sense when you are working on a big project that contains lots of code that other people wrote, and you rely on IDE features like jumping to definition, etc. But if you can write code that fits on one screen without scrolling, something special happens. It's like all the negative aspects of terse code suddenly vanish and you get something way simpler and overall easier to work with and understand. But you really have to work to get it to that point. A middle ground (terse code but still spread out over lots of files, lots of scrolling) would be the worst of both worlds.
"john ousterhout's book is the only book on how to write software that has any actual evidence behind it."
This is false and hopefully no one takes you seriously when they read that. There are books about empirical methods for software engineering, for example, which actually seek to find real evidence for software engineering techniques. See Greg Wilson's work, for example.
There are lots of other architecture/design books that use real world systems as examples. "Evidence" is definitely lacking in our field, but you can find it if you try.
+1 for Software Tools by Kernighan and Plauger. It was eye-opening for me because it really made me understand the unix philosophy of composing programs out of smaller programs.
It's sort of sad, but really I think it is a weight off my shoulders.