I read a comment stating that git (a tool programmers use to collaborate on code, sort of like Word’s Track Changes) is not a version control system but a “system for creating a version control system.”

That got me thinking about other such “metasystems” I use, and the frustration that arises when one expects a mere system and instead gets the meta thing.

Anki

Anki is a system for making a flashcard system. I’ve used this excellent program for about four years to memorize Korean vocab. But the first time I tried Anki, I downloaded a stock deck of Korean words and felt confused and overwhelmed.

Studying with someone else’s Anki deck is a mistake, because it skips the most important part of spaced repetition learning: determining what you’re actually trying to learn and breaking it into flashcard-sized units. For example, if you’re using Anki to learn a language, how do you want to handle synonyms? (That might be a separate post.) Creating your own deck forces you to answer such questions and clarify your learning goals.

Microsoft Excel

Much hated, but much misunderstood. You may think Excel is a spreadsheet tool, but it’s actually a tool for making spreadsheet tools.

I learned this the hard way when I did process automation stuff at work and witnessed how widely people’s Excel conventions vary. Everyone uses the file/worksheet/row/column hierarchy differently. Some enlightened people code booleans using the native TRUE and FALSE, but others use the strings “yes” and “no” (or blank), the checkbox widget, or the cell background color (have fun querying that in Pandas).

Did you know that Excel incorporates an entire programming language? OK, but did you know about the other one? Or sorry, this one?

Sometimes, I wish Excel had a bumpers mode that removes all the formatting options (especially Merge Cells!!) and forces you to put data in named tables with strict column types. But that would just be a spreadsheet tool. It wouldn’t be Excel.

CSS

CSS is how you set the color, layout, and style of web pages. The CSS for this site is quite a mess, a bunch of ad-hoc fixes tacked on as I added new features to Illusion Slopes. I’ve gotten better at CSS since setting up the Jekyll build, but my skills are mainly useful on new projects, where I can architect the HTML and CSS from scratch. The mental shift I made is from using CSS to style an individual page, to using CSS to create a system that styles pages. A cascade of styles, if you will …

This post from Jacob Bleser outlines the kind of CSS system I want to set up for my site once I gather the courage to do a big migration.

Powerful but frustrating

Everyone new to git has had the xkcd 1597 experience of trashing and re-cloning the repo to make a merge work. Metasystems like git are powerful but hard to learn, which explains the abundance of businesses like GitHub that purport to make the underlying tool more approachable.

But a good metasystem tends to resist such taming efforts because it is precisely as complex as the problem space requires. Simplifying tools are often unwieldly in their own ways (see this critique of Tailwind CSS), while disappointing power users who want access to the raw workflow—the worst of both worlds.

But hey, they added yet another programming language to Excel.