I believe it's a little bit of "column A" and a little bit of "column B". On one hand it can feel maddening that a generation (or two) of young IT professional

I believe it's a little bit of "column A" and a little bit of "column B". On one hand it can feel maddening that a generation (or two) of young IT professionals have seemingly gone full-circle and tried all kinds of techniques only to end up leaning on tried-and-true technologies of the past (think: NoSQL vs ACID compliant relational DB's, Ruby/Python vs Elixir/Erlang, Flash/Flex - XML based design vs React/Javascript/HTML5/Canvas, Dynamic vs Strict typing, etc). There has been a lot of re-inventing. However, I think this had to happen. Many great ideas of the past were amazing ideas but they simply were before their time, not quite implemented well enough, we're too heavy/complex for the hardware at the time, and so-on. Software has been moving too fast for the collective mind to keep up. Maybe, in an ideal world, we would have methodically built up on the best of software from the 60's without wasting time and effort experimenting with new ideas. Honestly, that might have been awesome for productivity and the advancement of humanity as a whole. That's not how we seem to function as people, though. I can't help but think of "space travel" here (it sure didn't carry on exponentially from the moon landing ~50 years ago). In my mind I believe this always happens with technology of any kind. It may be why we're discovering that ancient civilizations probably had much more interesting technology than we initially imagined. They simply has certain cycles where they "really hit a sweet spot" and other periods where it all became contrived. On that note, if anyone has any suggestions for books about this subject please let me know. I know it's not an original thought and I'd bet there's been some interesting research.