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>In that sense, the most important property of a language is its popularity: it will ensure connectors exist, and are used enough to be working fine. I would h

>In that sense, the most important property of a language is its popularity: it will ensure connectors exist, and are used enough to be working fine. I would have thought so too, but surprisingly we have seen completely new ecosystems emerge where incumbants had seemingly covered all the bases. When Node.js and Go came along, we already had Perl, PHP, Python, Java and C# for backends (as well as tons of less popular options). Each new player offered some technical benefits, but I never felt that these relatively modest technical differences merited starting a whole new library ecosystem and doing it all over again. I can only conclude that you and I are wrong to think that the availability of mature libraries dominates other factors such as people wanting to get rid of the previous generation's culture. Wiping the slate clean seems to be a deeply felt desire.

tempodox 2y ago
Fashion-driven development is obviously much more pervasive than we'd like to admit. And if I don't understand the previous tech better than the new one I might just as well use what's hot and all the rage now.
whizzter 2y ago
Most of the stalwarts you mention had been built to depend on more or less huge systems where the webserver/appserver was in a central postion (Apache, J2EE or IIS), node had a certain minimalness combined with client/server code sharing going for it and Go had the whole "be as cool as Google" vibe off it (also not tied to a big server but being self-contained) and both of them meshed well with a certain microservice trend of those days. Yes, there was a certain hype driving them but they also fit into the "devops" paradigm shift where the unit of management became a container/application instead of begging a BOFH to configure part of a "large" server that were suddenly becoming commoditized (The desire wasn't maybe so much a clean slate as to not be held back by sysadmins).

tempodox 2y ago

Fashion-driven development is obviously much more pervasive than we'd like to admit. And if I don't understand the previous tech better than the new one I might just as well use what's hot and all the rage now.

whizzter 2y ago

Most of the stalwarts you mention had been built to depend on more or less huge systems where the webserver/appserver was in a central postion (Apache, J2EE or IIS), node had a certain minimalness combined with client/server code sharing going for it and Go had the whole "be as cool as Google" vibe off it (also not tied to a big server but being self-contained) and both of them meshed well with a certain microservice trend of those days. Yes, there was a certain hype driving them but they also fit into the "devops" paradigm shift where the unit of management became a container/application instead of begging a BOFH to configure part of a "large" server that were suddenly becoming commoditized (The desire wasn't maybe so much a clean slate as to not be held back by sysadmins).