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I feel like this article didn't age so well. It was written at the end of a decade long hype cycle when a lot of old ideas got replaced by new ones. A bunch of
by skrebbel 4y ago
I feel like this article didn't age so well.
It was written at the end of a decade long hype cycle when a lot of old ideas got replaced by new ones. A bunch of these new ideas (eg mongodb) went out of vogue, but a whole bunch simply got better and established.
At the same time, a lot of previously boring technology caught up, so we now got to the point where formerly non-boring technology got more stable and established, and boring technology got, eh, less boring.
Eg Java severely un-sucked itself as a language. And if you still don't like it, you can use Kotlin and still get a fantastic ecosystem, tooling, etc etc skipping all the reasons to choose boring tech. Postgres got all kinds of fancy new features, including indexable jsonb which lets it compete with lots of NoSQL DBs. And so on, and so forth.
On the non-boring side, Go, Elixir, Rust, Redis all became stable, dependable technology choices that really aren't at all as risky as they used to be in 2015. Is Java more boring than Elixir? Sure, but is the Elixir ecosystem so tiny that picking it is a major risk? Definitely not.
The gap between what used to be boring and not narrowed a lot. Of course there's still new non-boring tech, but somehow it all feels a bit less paradigm changing to me. Eg React turned front-end dev upside down. Vue and Svelte just iterate on its ideas a bit.
Sure there's still some good ideas here. Maybe think twice before building a web app in 100% Rust, wasm-compiled on the frontend to a webgl based custom UI. But I don't think that's the kind of way-out-there stuff the authors of this article had in mind.
- KronisLV 4y ago> The gap between what used to be boring and not narrowed a lot. Of course there's still new non-boring tech, but somehow it all feels a bit less paradigm changing to me. What about new tech that's boring by design? To me, that kind of feels why Go succeeded: it didn't attempt to solve all of the world's problems, merely become a relatively simple language that one can pick up and be productive in reasonably quickly, while also having a decent amount of batteries included. Over the years, there have been relatively few major changes (generics come to mind, but those don't really break much old code at all) and it's remained somewhat stable/boring throughout the years.