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The person you responded to is using a different definition of popular than you are. Popular: 1. Widely liked or appreciated. 3. Of, representing, or carried o
by BlackFly 3y ago
The person you responded to is using a different definition of popular than you are.
Popular:
1. Widely liked or appreciated.
3. Of, representing, or carried on by the people at large.
In the phrase, "use popular tech because it is popular" you should think of the latter definition: carried on by the people at large. Hence the comparison to "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM." Instead some people decide to call this "boring" technology and you have a movement of people trying to make boring choices glamorous that the person you are responding to is lamenting. The article is saying to use popular technology (definition 3 above) because of the implications of "at large".
Pragmatically, the folklore isn't helpful. Choosing boring technology and then building an ad hoc layer on top of it compared to using a cutting edge off the shelf solution for the problem at hand shouldn't be an easy decision based on engineering folklore. The difficulty is often in seeing that your actual problem is well adapted (never perfectly) to a particular novel technical choice and compounding that is the difficulty of knowing about the novel technology and what problem it is actually adapted to solving. Hence the need for technical vision and understanding of the problem.
- pdonis 3y ago> The person you responded to is using a different definition of popular than you are. No, he's conflating "popular" as he uses the term with "boring" as the article uses that term, which, as I explained, is not valid. As the GP uses "popular", I agree that tech should not be chosen because it is "popular"; see my response to tikhonj's follow-up post. But as I noted in that response, the article is not arguing for choosing tech because it is "popular" in that sense. > The article is saying to use popular technology (definition 3 above) because of the implications of "at large". No, the article is saying that you should not even care whether tech is "popular" in any of your senses; you should choose tech based on whether it does the job that you need done based on much prior experience. I.e., based on technical criteria, not popularity (in any sense). The article does imply that tech that does the job you need done based on much prior experience will be "popular" in your sense 3, but that does not mean it is telling you to choose the tech based on popularity.