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I wonder how well the Lindy effect can be applied to picking a technology stack. Clearly, there's some benefits to choosing something new and hot- it wouldn't
by mabbo 5y ago
I wonder how well the Lindy effect can be applied to picking a technology stack.
Clearly, there's some benefits to choosing something new and hot- it wouldn't be hot if it weren't doing something useful that it's predecessors did not. But there's also an advantage to picking something that's been around a while.
I suppose in my mind one can say "Presume I am willing to rewrite this in K years- I want to pick a tech stack of things that have all been around at least K years".
If you're whipping up a prototype in a deliver-before-money-runs-out environment, you use what you need to use to deliver something immediately and accept that a rewrite next year after you get funding is fine. Pick new tech if it's fast. If you're in a big company and know that this thing you write is going to have to exist for a decade, well, nobody is going to fire you for building your backend on Java.
- dsr_ 5y agoIt's a new name for a relatively old practice: build your experimental thing on top of the sturdiest foundation you can afford.
- marttt 5y agoMy proverb for the same thing is "never forget the best parts of obsolete technology".
- bionhoward 5y agoI would fire you if you wrote the back end in java
- cpp_frog 5y agoI think that the (engineering and computing) technology version of the concept may be best exemplified by unix and Fortran/C/C++. At least in my field, Numerical Analysis of PDE, we encounter computationally heavy problems daily, and for decades numerical analysts have been coding on unix/linux in those languages. I recently discovered code that my own grandfather used for solving thin shell problems, which are studied by some civil engineers. It was written in Fortran, but he used punched cards (1974).
- amadeuspagel 5y agoReminds me of Choose Boring Technology[1]. I guess the essay might as well be called "Choose Lindy Technology". [1]: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology