I think there's something fundamentally gross about almond milk.

(Yes, I am a picky eater.)

The thing I find gross about it is it pretends to be milk… but isn't.

If my expectation is "milk" when I drink it, my body will go "wait, watch out, something is off…"

If I didn't have the expectation of it as milk, I don't think I'd find it nearly as gross.

This general disgust reaction happens in a lot of contexts, where there's something that purports to be the same as a familiar item, but is off.

Frameworks that include a lot of magic feel like this.

For example, the original Golang App Engine implementation had a whole forked Go ecosystem, which always felt… off.

Often when things are "off" like this it's hard for people to explain why they don't like it, they just feel a disgust and distrust of it.

Sometimes the faux thing can get very close to the thing it's mimicking, so that 95% of the time you won't notice a difference.

But that 5% of the time will have a bite.

The closer you get to being the same, the more that last bit will be unexpected, and the harder it will bite.

Sometimes the answer is not to pretend to be another thing, but to lean into being your own thing.