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Oddly missing the point for an article about missing the point. Either you care about the future and prestige of your platform, or you don't (COBOL). If you d

Oddly missing the point for an article about missing the point. Either you care about the future and prestige of your platform, or you don't (COBOL). If you do care about the prestige of the JVM, the future is still definitely awesome. Scala, Clojure, JRuby and all of the other wonderful languages provide a common base for interoperability. That's pretty sweet. Java the language, as a secure place to get a job is entirely separate from that. Making bank (ha) off of other people's past poor technology choices isn't a future for your tools. It may be an economic opportunity, but it's not a future. And if all you care about is having a job and writing lines of code, sure, legacy code base work is fine. But some of us care about more.

rch 15y ago
I certainly identify with your point, but I actually had the opposite reaction to this article; particularly the second half. I started my career working on 'serious' software, then switched to web applications for a few years, and have recently settled into building multi-faceted, research-oriented systems -- and throughout the entire experience, I have consistently found myself having to apologize for the hype and hyperbole surrounding the many of the more modern technologies that I've wanted to work with. Have a look at the HDF5 libraries... notice the Fortran support? That is a Huge positive for me, even though I hope to never write another line of Fortran in my life. Sometimes there is no 'selling' new tech to a CIO; it just needs to both appear and actually be absolutely solid (for lack of a better word). Incidentally, I don't think this is a poorly titled article at all -- the author was being ironic, and will probably be rewarded with a 10x spike in traffic from people looking for talking points to take to their next Rails meetup... that's actually pretty funny.
- knowtheory 15y ago
  Right but there's a difference between hype and experimentation with new tools and methodologies. Cargo-culting is never a good idea. But to say that new and better techniques have not come out of (or been popularized by) new movements in software and business is simply false. The stodginess and perhaps arrogance of academic and deeper research posts are just as obnoxious and hobbling as novelty-chasing unprincipled startup entrepreneur. We should pick technologies because they're the right choice for the tasks we're trying to accomplish. Sometimes that requires reaching for tried and true technologies (POSIX ftw after all), but sometimes new technologies really do change the world, and we should do our best to encourage that. Lastly, it's really just not true that all press is good press. You can gloss over occasional bad press with a much larger weight of good press, or converting a lot of bad press into good press with a small group of people (Palin's "Lamestream Media"), but bad press is just bad press. Being known for starting flamewars w/o additional contributions to the community pretty quickly marks you as a troll.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    Cargo-culting is never a good idea. If it leads you to discover the underlying principles, then it is. This happens often in music.
    - knowtheory 15y ago
      No, cargo-culting is a bad idea if you don't know why you would pick a piece of technology. I'm okay with technology being a crutch, and helping to carry you over terrain you do not yet understand. But that is different from using technology you do not understand for reasons you do not understand. Just using a NoSQL store, because it's a NoSQL store is a bad idea, and can lead to all sorts of dangerous consequences.
  - rch 15y ago
    My concern, one that I believe I share with the author, is that the zero-sum tenor of tech-community discourse is overshadowing the more fundamental advances (and setbacks) that we could be focused on. And the attitudes of what seems to be a generation of edit-line/update-browser developers is only making it that much more difficult to drag those advances into established industries. I am genuinely disappointed with the present state of affairs, and therefore more willing to wade through an ocean of arrogance to find some intellectual merit. There's so much to do...
    - knowtheory 15y ago
      This sounds like redirection to me. I've just said that i believe that we should be using technology based on its merits. I think that is a separate issue from either whether new technology is always good/better than existing technologies, or whether we need to continue to support and encourage the development of new technologies (meh to the former, a definite yes to the latter). Established industries on the other hand, need to get over themselves and actually track how new technologies can change and improve their businesses or fields, and I think that, yes, there's a danger of them getting snookered by glad-handing shysters just looking to sell them the hot new thing, but again, this is why it's so critical to have a solid understanding of technological change. you don't have to wade through an ocean of crap technologies, if you have more finely honed crap detection skills. For example, Coffeescript is a solid and well thought out technology built on top of existing javascript semantics. I can tell almost immediately that it's a sensible and minimalist technology, developed with solid principles, and robust community support. Technologies like Objective-J/Cappuccino on the other hand, do not give me that sense. Sproutcore, up until recently, also seemed like a bloated technology, with a good core idea, but which had become overgrown and lost in it's subsequent iterations. I am not a long-time Javascript developer, but, i have tastes and aesthetics about what i think is important in a development platform, and the sorts of qualities good ones should have. And the further I develop my javascript chops, the more confident i feel in my assessment.

rch 15y ago

I certainly identify with your point, but I actually had the opposite reaction to this article; particularly the second half. I started my career working on 'serious' software, then switched to web applications for a few years, and have recently settled into building multi-faceted, research-oriented systems -- and throughout the entire experience, I have consistently found myself having to apologize for the hype and hyperbole surrounding the many of the more modern technologies that I've wanted to work with. Have a look at the HDF5 libraries... notice the Fortran support? That is a Huge positive for me, even though I hope to never write another line of Fortran in my life. Sometimes there is no 'selling' new tech to a CIO; it just needs to both appear and actually be absolutely solid (for lack of a better word). Incidentally, I don't think this is a poorly titled article at all -- the author was being ironic, and will probably be rewarded with a 10x spike in traffic from people looking for talking points to take to their next Rails meetup... that's actually pretty funny.

knowtheory 15y ago
Right but there's a difference between hype and experimentation with new tools and methodologies. Cargo-culting is never a good idea. But to say that new and better techniques have not come out of (or been popularized by) new movements in software and business is simply false. The stodginess and perhaps arrogance of academic and deeper research posts are just as obnoxious and hobbling as novelty-chasing unprincipled startup entrepreneur. We should pick technologies because they're the right choice for the tasks we're trying to accomplish. Sometimes that requires reaching for tried and true technologies (POSIX ftw after all), but sometimes new technologies really do change the world, and we should do our best to encourage that. Lastly, it's really just not true that all press is good press. You can gloss over occasional bad press with a much larger weight of good press, or converting a lot of bad press into good press with a small group of people (Palin's "Lamestream Media"), but bad press is just bad press. Being known for starting flamewars w/o additional contributions to the community pretty quickly marks you as a troll.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  Cargo-culting is never a good idea. If it leads you to discover the underlying principles, then it is. This happens often in music.
  - knowtheory 15y ago
    No, cargo-culting is a bad idea if you don't know why you would pick a piece of technology. I'm okay with technology being a crutch, and helping to carry you over terrain you do not yet understand. But that is different from using technology you do not understand for reasons you do not understand. Just using a NoSQL store, because it's a NoSQL store is a bad idea, and can lead to all sorts of dangerous consequences.
- rch 15y ago
  My concern, one that I believe I share with the author, is that the zero-sum tenor of tech-community discourse is overshadowing the more fundamental advances (and setbacks) that we could be focused on. And the attitudes of what seems to be a generation of edit-line/update-browser developers is only making it that much more difficult to drag those advances into established industries. I am genuinely disappointed with the present state of affairs, and therefore more willing to wade through an ocean of arrogance to find some intellectual merit. There's so much to do...
  - knowtheory 15y ago
    This sounds like redirection to me. I've just said that i believe that we should be using technology based on its merits. I think that is a separate issue from either whether new technology is always good/better than existing technologies, or whether we need to continue to support and encourage the development of new technologies (meh to the former, a definite yes to the latter). Established industries on the other hand, need to get over themselves and actually track how new technologies can change and improve their businesses or fields, and I think that, yes, there's a danger of them getting snookered by glad-handing shysters just looking to sell them the hot new thing, but again, this is why it's so critical to have a solid understanding of technological change. you don't have to wade through an ocean of crap technologies, if you have more finely honed crap detection skills. For example, Coffeescript is a solid and well thought out technology built on top of existing javascript semantics. I can tell almost immediately that it's a sensible and minimalist technology, developed with solid principles, and robust community support. Technologies like Objective-J/Cappuccino on the other hand, do not give me that sense. Sproutcore, up until recently, also seemed like a bloated technology, with a good core idea, but which had become overgrown and lost in it's subsequent iterations. I am not a long-time Javascript developer, but, i have tastes and aesthetics about what i think is important in a development platform, and the sorts of qualities good ones should have. And the further I develop my javascript chops, the more confident i feel in my assessment.