3 ms·

Not that much better is true, but every time I see tech that is worse win because it had better marketing it makes me sad and a little angry. It was quite irri

by pydry 3y ago

Not that much better is true, but every time I see tech that is worse win because it had better marketing it makes me sad and a little angry. It was quite irritating to invest time not only in figuring out which was better initially (only to discover that this didn't matter), but to invest time learning the better one and then to lose all that investment in memorizing commands/keystrokes/concepts. It's true that most of them map so it's way easier than picking it up from scratch, but it's still a hefty chunk of effort and the annoyance I felt because I felt like I shouldn't have to do this made it harder. Mongo makes me rage for the same reason (but way worse). I know I could learn about its equivalents of indexes and foreign keys and materialized views or whatever but I honestly really just want it to fuck off and die and get replaced by postgres in every single situation where it is used. It is a genuinely shittier technology that grew popular on the strength of marketing (image) rather than quality and that is why I'm forced to learn it.

sanderjd 3y ago
I don't think "better marketing" is the main thing going on. I think the main thing is network effects. For git specifically, I think having a giant project right out of the gate gave its initial "network" of people who knew how to use it such a huge head start that it was always going to be difficult for anything else to catch up, at least in open source, where network effects matter a lot. I do think the story with MongoDB in particular has a lot to do with marketing, but IMO the broader story is that objects (/ "documents") are actually a more natural fit for modeling the storage of application state in oltp databases than are relational databases (though relational databases are certainly unmatched for analytical use cases). I'd say that the popularity of MongoDB despite the relative weakness of its implementation of that insight has been more annoyingly detrimental to the object/document store approach than to the relational DB approach. That is, the backlash to "MongoDB doesn't work very well" has been "just use postgresql" rather than "we need a better document database implementation". Coincidentally, just yesterday I was looking into pg's object store capabilities in order to suggest "use pg as a hybrid relational / document store" as a potential compromise solution to get to consensus in a relational vs. document-store discussion. But I found it pretty lacking, frankly. It's nice that jsonb exists, but its capabilities seem quite limited. For instance, it seems I can't use json-schema to define the schema of a jsonb column? (I did conclude that I need to do more research before rejecting this out of hand, but my initial research was not as promising as I had hoped.)

by pydry 3y ago

sanderjd 3y ago

I don't think "better marketing" is the main thing going on. I think the main thing is network effects. For git specifically, I think having a giant project right out of the gate gave its initial "network" of people who knew how to use it such a huge head start that it was always going to be difficult for anything else to catch up, at least in open source, where network effects matter a lot. I do think the story with MongoDB in particular has a lot to do with marketing, but IMO the broader story is that objects (/ "documents") are actually a more natural fit for modeling the storage of application state in oltp databases than are relational databases (though relational databases are certainly unmatched for analytical use cases). I'd say that the popularity of MongoDB despite the relative weakness of its implementation of that insight has been more annoyingly detrimental to the object/document store approach than to the relational DB approach. That is, the backlash to "MongoDB doesn't work very well" has been "just use postgresql" rather than "we need a better document database implementation". Coincidentally, just yesterday I was looking into pg's object store capabilities in order to suggest "use pg as a hybrid relational / document store" as a potential compromise solution to get to consensus in a relational vs. document-store discussion. But I found it pretty lacking, frankly. It's nice that jsonb exists, but its capabilities seem quite limited. For instance, it seems I can't use json-schema to define the schema of a jsonb column? (I did conclude that I need to do more research before rejecting this out of hand, but my initial research was not as promising as I had hoped.)