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On the heels of the "Rails is old and gray" discussions that have popped up here recently, I have to wonder: at what point is it necessary to accept a given fra

On the heels of the "Rails is old and gray" discussions that have popped up here recently, I have to wonder: at what point is it necessary to accept a given framework is past its prime, even if it is still being used? If the abandoned project is open-sourced and the community can take care of it from there, great, but what about developers who can't spare extra labor to fix bugs, vulnerabilities, etc. I'm just a little concerned about how rapidly things are changing and being forgotten in the process. You can't blame a for-profit company for abandoning a project that drags on growth, but how will future historians piece together the lives in our time when operating systems and web app frameworks are abandoned and forgotten? Edit: I am reminded of a statement from an Economist article on this issue: http://www.economist.com/node/21553445 http://www.economist.com/node/21553445

mindcrime 10y ago
I'm just a little concerned about how rapidly things are changing and being forgotten in the process. You can't blame a for-profit company for abandoning a project that drags on growth, but how will future historians piece together the lives in our time when operating systems and web app frameworks are abandoned and forgotten? From what I've seen, technologies very rarely ever actually die. Sure, the trend-of-the-day changes, and this industry, which is WAY too fashion-driven, starts to assume that the "old stuff" is dead, but it never is. Or almost never. Look around a bit, and you'll find plenty of people still building apps in FORTRAN, COBOL, Ada, RPG, Pascal, Delphi, and all sorts of other languages that most people think of as relics. Granted, hardware is a little bit of a different story - for example, you'll probably have some difficulty finding Token Ring or ARCnet networking kit these days. But even there, I'm sure you can find a few crusty S/38 boxes or VAXen or something, out there plugging away (probably connected via Token Ring or ARCnet too!) I won't dispute that there's a point where something new comes along that offers legitimate advantages, and that there's a time to start moving away from certain technologies for one reason or another. But I'll also argue that a lot of us are way too quick to write off "old" technologies, and are prone to re-inventing the wheel and/or failing to learn from the lessons of history.

mindcrime 10y ago

I'm just a little concerned about how rapidly things are changing and being forgotten in the process. You can't blame a for-profit company for abandoning a project that drags on growth, but how will future historians piece together the lives in our time when operating systems and web app frameworks are abandoned and forgotten? From what I've seen, technologies very rarely ever actually die. Sure, the trend-of-the-day changes, and this industry, which is WAY too fashion-driven, starts to assume that the "old stuff" is dead, but it never is. Or almost never. Look around a bit, and you'll find plenty of people still building apps in FORTRAN, COBOL, Ada, RPG, Pascal, Delphi, and all sorts of other languages that most people think of as relics. Granted, hardware is a little bit of a different story - for example, you'll probably have some difficulty finding Token Ring or ARCnet networking kit these days. But even there, I'm sure you can find a few crusty S/38 boxes or VAXen or something, out there plugging away (probably connected via Token Ring or ARCnet too!) I won't dispute that there's a point where something new comes along that offers legitimate advantages, and that there's a time to start moving away from certain technologies for one reason or another. But I'll also argue that a lot of us are way too quick to write off "old" technologies, and are prone to re-inventing the wheel and/or failing to learn from the lessons of history.