4 ms·
Generally, "shiny-things" have some sort of appeal over the "boring" technology, or nobody would choose them at all. One of the places I'd say they are appropr
by jerf 7y ago
Generally, "shiny-things" have some sort of appeal over the "boring" technology, or nobody would choose them at all.
One of the places I'd say they are appropriate are in places where you have some problem where some "shiny-thing" stands head and shoulders above the "boring technology" in some particular and you can ram home those advantages well enough to overcome the other issues. For instance, if you've got a server where you're going to have several thousand clients opening a socket connection and babbling away at each other in some custom manner, starting with Erlang/Elixir is quite possibly a very good idea, because none of the "boring" tech is anywhere near as good at that, even today.
But I do agree that when doing the cost/benefit analyses of these choices, far too many developers plop an unprofessional amount of weight on the "benefit" side that amounts to "it's fun to play with the pretty-shiny". (I'm still recovering from some old "NoSQL" decisions made in a context where a relational database would have been more than adequate, at most backed by something that even at the time was tested like memcached, instead of a combination of what are now completely defunct and semi-defunct databases.)
- zzzcpan 7y ago> I'm still recovering from some old "NoSQL" decisions made in a context where a relational database would have been more than adequate People jumped to NoSQL because of how awful a relational database actually is to operate. I guess it's easy to forget.
- jerf 7y agoTrue, but in this context, they had a relational database, and the relational database is still there, and isn't going anywhere, so not a big win there. Plus, the real problem is that the correct solution was something that was already boring at the time, memcached. If all you literally are using a "NoSQL" database like MongoDB for is a key-value store and literally nothing else, you don't need NoSQL, you just need a boring key-value store.
- hobs 7y agoTo operate? Do you mean for a developer to work with? Because most RDBMs systems I have worked with are much easier on the operator than most NoSQL systems for HA/DR.
- zzzcpan 7y agoNo, not to work with a running system someone else operates, but to run it in production yourself.
- arethuza 7y agoDoesn't that rather depend on which SQL database you are using?
- yellowapple 7y agoIndeed it does. There's a huge difference in ease of maintenance in production between (e.g.) PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server.