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There can be significant risk in choosing unfashionable tools if upstream maintenance dies off and you aren't equipped to maintain them yourself.

bpatrianakos 14y ago
No, this isn't correct. Fashionability has nothing to do with it. PHP is not fashionable - in fact I'd argue that right now it might be the most despised language around - but upstream development isn't slowing down at all but in fact speeding up and it's being improved at a very rapid pace as of late. I think choosing fashionable tools because you think upstream maintenance will continue into the future is actually misguided. In my experience the old, boring tools are what have staying power. The new fashion comes out, gets lot of attention, then the next big thing steals its thunder and you start seeing your fashionable tool's upstream updates go from a stream to a trickle to droplets here and there and finally you start to wonder if the project is dead. Maybe you meant something different but just by going off what you said I'd say you're wrong. There's a difference between something popular with staying power and the latest fashion. I think the JavaScript world, node.js in particular, is in a period where for all its new hotness we'll start to see a lot of these popular modules just die. I think node may soon become a good example of why fashionable tools are not to be relied upon. That isn't to say that node itself is going anywhere but rather that its in a transition period from new hotness to something more stable and the NPM packages are what we'll see start dropping like flies before we can be sure what we can count on later.
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  Right, the difference between "fashionable" and "unfashionable" is just what the cool kids on HN say it is. To take your example on a stroll, PHP is like regular (non-skinny) blue jeans. Everyone knows them, most people use them, every store carries them, at one point in history they were revolutionary, they're probably never going to go away. But the cool kids say skin-tight crazy-colored jeans are the new hotness...
yogo 14y ago
I think this goes for the latest and most hyped where the communities could be small. A good middle ground would be well-established projects with a relatively big community and preferably strong industry ties. Usually projects over a certain size will survive by some faction of the community even if it's losing steam or something dramatic happens sort of like MySQL and MariaDB.

bpatrianakos 14y ago

No, this isn't correct. Fashionability has nothing to do with it. PHP is not fashionable - in fact I'd argue that right now it might be the most despised language around - but upstream development isn't slowing down at all but in fact speeding up and it's being improved at a very rapid pace as of late. I think choosing fashionable tools because you think upstream maintenance will continue into the future is actually misguided. In my experience the old, boring tools are what have staying power. The new fashion comes out, gets lot of attention, then the next big thing steals its thunder and you start seeing your fashionable tool's upstream updates go from a stream to a trickle to droplets here and there and finally you start to wonder if the project is dead. Maybe you meant something different but just by going off what you said I'd say you're wrong. There's a difference between something popular with staying power and the latest fashion. I think the JavaScript world, node.js in particular, is in a period where for all its new hotness we'll start to see a lot of these popular modules just die. I think node may soon become a good example of why fashionable tools are not to be relied upon. That isn't to say that node itself is going anywhere but rather that its in a transition period from new hotness to something more stable and the NPM packages are what we'll see start dropping like flies before we can be sure what we can count on later.

Domenic_S 14y ago
Right, the difference between "fashionable" and "unfashionable" is just what the cool kids on HN say it is. To take your example on a stroll, PHP is like regular (non-skinny) blue jeans. Everyone knows them, most people use them, every store carries them, at one point in history they were revolutionary, they're probably never going to go away. But the cool kids say skin-tight crazy-colored jeans are the new hotness...

yogo 14y ago

I think this goes for the latest and most hyped where the communities could be small. A good middle ground would be well-established projects with a relatively big community and preferably strong industry ties. Usually projects over a certain size will survive by some faction of the community even if it's losing steam or something dramatic happens sort of like MySQL and MariaDB.