Apropos of nothing I thought about some interesting dichotomies and wanted to share my perspective. It is interesting how often there are effectively 2 sides to a coin.
Religious Faith/Religious Dogma - Some folks live the "spirit" of the Word and resist structure vs. others, who follow strict adherence to "the letter" of the Word.
Subjective/Objective - You have here opinion and feeling (the supernatural) vs. facts and laws of nature.
Romantic/Classical - similar to the Subjective/Objective dichotomy (see also, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance").
Liberal/Conservative - The ideology of inclusion and change vs. the ideology of exclusion and stasis.
Conglomerate/Individual Co. - Whereas many corporations sought to obtain economies of scale through M&A in 80s, 90s and 00s, General Electric proved- (sold GE Capital, spun off GE Healthcare, GE Aviation and GE Power into 3 individual new companies)- that the conglomerate model doesn't always stand the test of time.
Thin client/Fat client - It makes no sense to be all one or all the other (an overburdened SPA app or an inflexible server-side only app). But we keep moving between one (thin client terminals in the 70s and 80s) and the other (fat client Home PCs in the 90s and 00s). And we've moved back to thin client again with Azure, AWS and GPC and the omnipresence of SaaS. But at the same time, fat-client SPA apps are as popular as ever... I guess we have fat client UIs and thin client APIs.
Imperative/Declarative code - Instructions that read like a book vs. instructions that read like a mathematical proof.
Monolithic app/Microservices - a very heavy Swiss-Army knife vs. a bunch of lightweight kitchen knives.
Software/Hardware - Recipes vs. the raw food itself.
Socialism/Capitalism - The idea that everyone is the same and should be reduced to (or propped up by) exactly such vs. the idea that everyone is incompatibly unique and should be uniquely catered to and provided maximum personal freedoms that can- like assault weapons and ammunition- come at the expense of the greater community.
Urban/Rural - Those from the densely populated cities and suburbs vs. those from the sparsely populated country towns.
Introvert/Extrovert - He or she who expends a great deal of energy socializing and finds solace in silence vs. he or she who is energized by interpersonal social connection and is not comfortable alone for extended periods of time.
Centralization/Decentralization- Putting the heart of a system at the center with dependent, often necessarily-generic/homogenized nodes vs. putting the heart on the nodes themselves, at the expense of (losing) ease of simultaneous node (state) synchronization and a "single source of truth/golden records".
