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I'm not sure that the "new technologies" you listed are very good examples. Rack, for instance, isn't really that much different from CGI, FastCGI, SCGI, NSAPI

I'm not sure that the "new technologies" you listed are very good examples. Rack, for instance, isn't really that much different from CGI, FastCGI, SCGI, NSAPI, ISAPI, Apache modules, and so forth. It's just one more way of invoking custom code to handle an HTTP request. This is something we've been doing for many years now, and it really isn't "new". The same goes for Sinatra. I remember seeing Perl and Tcl code in the 1990s that essentially did the same thing. It's pretty much the most basic and obvious way of handling such a situation. Cucumber reminds me of some internal software I dealt with at one firm back in the 1980s. Business analysts would write English-like acceptance tests, then feed them to a program that would generate PL/I code that'd automatically test different aspects of an accounting system. Clojure is perhaps the worst of the examples. It's merely a dialect of a programming language that's over 50 years old. Many of us first worked with Lisp decades ago. Even targeting the JVM doesn't make it special, given that the Java platform has been publicly available for almost 20 years, and was targeted by non-Java languages well before Clojure attempted it. While the implementations may be new, the ideas surely aren't. Having worked with equivalent technologies in the past, sometimes decades ago, many of us here just don't find them interesting or special in any way.

thedanfilter 13y ago
Congratulations to PommeDeTerre for providing the perfect example of the sort of comments that are so condescending. I hope that he/she meant it in jest.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  No, I'm completely serious. Can you explain how my last comment was "condescending"? It's not "condescending" to express an idea that differs from that of somebody else. It's not "condescending" to disagree with a claim made by somebody else. It's not "condescending" to give examples why a claim somebody else made may not be true. The commenter I replied to suggested that certain technologies were "new". I disagreed, and provided reasons why I don't consider them new, based on other technologies that I, and very likely others here, have used in the past. If you wish to discuss those technologies and their novelty, I'd welcome such discussion. If you disagree with my claims, that's fine. I'm just not certain how you accusing me of being "condescending", without even giving any evidence to back up this claim, is productive.
  - thedanfilter 13y ago
    To clarify, to me, each particular statement was condescending to the developers of those products. The comments are condescending because you imply that there is no difference between them and the technologies you listed. In reality, most advances are made incrementally, and if one wants to make such an advance then one often needs to reimplement some, or all, aspects of what has been done before. "What" a tool does is often irrelevant. Often advances occur in "How". And "How" is often either hard to communicate, not desirable to communicate (I.e. for competitive advantage), or not particularly interesting, but vitally important. Indeed, often existing technologies need to be trimmed back to provide a more useful subset - asm.js comes to mind. However, obviously the person you replied to was using those as _examples_. Your reply completely missed the point he was trying to make that new things, I.e. things that are not the same as other things, are used by people regardless of how similar they may be to other things.
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  - xtrumanx 13y ago
    I agree with you PommeDeTerre. It's hard for me to take this meme of "HN is full of negativity" seriously when I constantly see people (like thedanfilter above) complain about comments whose only faults are that they aren't full of glowing praise.
    - mratzloff 13y ago
      This is a quintessential "middlebrow dismissal", taking an uninteresting point, dismissing it with trivial technicalities, and pretending it added anything to the conversation. The conversation then gets sidetracked to debate semantics or pedantic details. I've started down-voting these types of posts.
      - xtrumanx 13y ago
        Presumably you are referring to PommeDeTerre's comment as "middlebrow dismissal" and I don't believe his intent was to sidetrack the debate with semantic and pedantic details. His comment is a new branch in the comment tree. If you find this branch uninteresting you're free to not follow it. Sometimes some really interesting conversations appear a few branches deep in the comment trees that are completely off-topic. I know where you're coming from and I've seen people use that "middlebrow dismissal" tactic you've described when passionately debating. I totally don't think that was PommeDeTerre's intent. It looked to me that he just believed that the examples akkartik were bad enough to warrant pointing out. He didn't attempt to tie that into completely dismissing akkartik whole comment. And for the record, I don't agree with PommeDeTerre's comment at all because I think he missed the point akkatrik was making when he listed his examples.
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akkartik 13y ago
What would you consider a 'real' technology? (Does my node example qualify?) --- What's the difference between 'programming language' and 'dialect'? 'Supports macros' or 'uses parens in surface syntax' doesn't feel like enough reason to label Clojure a dialect. Supersets of specs are closer to 'dialects', like ISO C and gcc C, or Kawa scheme and guile. Racket seems to add enough extra feature that programmers are quite likely to leave base scheme in any program, so it doesn't feel like a dialect either. --- (Parenthetically, since I'd rather discuss the original argument: I mildly agree with my sibling comment by thedanfilter: arguing about definitions doesn't feel like the most interesting conversation to have here. It feels nitpicky; you didn't actually ever comment on my original argument itself: that large-scale habits reveal developers aren't hard to impress. Do you disagree with it, or just with the examples I chose? However, gravitating toward words like 'condescending' just adds more heat than light. Avoiding introducing incendiary distractions is hard; I'm not sure I'm succeeding in this comment. But comments here would be improved if we all tried harder not to take the bait. Maybe we should all try to skip past the first three comments we feel the urge to respond to every morning, or something.)

thedanfilter 13y ago

Congratulations to PommeDeTerre for providing the perfect example of the sort of comments that are so condescending. I hope that he/she meant it in jest.

PommeDeTerre 13y ago
No, I'm completely serious. Can you explain how my last comment was "condescending"? It's not "condescending" to express an idea that differs from that of somebody else. It's not "condescending" to disagree with a claim made by somebody else. It's not "condescending" to give examples why a claim somebody else made may not be true. The commenter I replied to suggested that certain technologies were "new". I disagreed, and provided reasons why I don't consider them new, based on other technologies that I, and very likely others here, have used in the past. If you wish to discuss those technologies and their novelty, I'd welcome such discussion. If you disagree with my claims, that's fine. I'm just not certain how you accusing me of being "condescending", without even giving any evidence to back up this claim, is productive.
- thedanfilter 13y ago
  To clarify, to me, each particular statement was condescending to the developers of those products. The comments are condescending because you imply that there is no difference between them and the technologies you listed. In reality, most advances are made incrementally, and if one wants to make such an advance then one often needs to reimplement some, or all, aspects of what has been done before. "What" a tool does is often irrelevant. Often advances occur in "How". And "How" is often either hard to communicate, not desirable to communicate (I.e. for competitive advantage), or not particularly interesting, but vitally important. Indeed, often existing technologies need to be trimmed back to provide a more useful subset - asm.js comes to mind. However, obviously the person you replied to was using those as _examples_. Your reply completely missed the point he was trying to make that new things, I.e. things that are not the same as other things, are used by people regardless of how similar they may be to other things.
- deleted 13y ago
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- xtrumanx 13y ago
  I agree with you PommeDeTerre. It's hard for me to take this meme of "HN is full of negativity" seriously when I constantly see people (like thedanfilter above) complain about comments whose only faults are that they aren't full of glowing praise.
  - mratzloff 13y ago
    This is a quintessential "middlebrow dismissal", taking an uninteresting point, dismissing it with trivial technicalities, and pretending it added anything to the conversation. The conversation then gets sidetracked to debate semantics or pedantic details. I've started down-voting these types of posts.
    - xtrumanx 13y ago
      Presumably you are referring to PommeDeTerre's comment as "middlebrow dismissal" and I don't believe his intent was to sidetrack the debate with semantic and pedantic details. His comment is a new branch in the comment tree. If you find this branch uninteresting you're free to not follow it. Sometimes some really interesting conversations appear a few branches deep in the comment trees that are completely off-topic. I know where you're coming from and I've seen people use that "middlebrow dismissal" tactic you've described when passionately debating. I totally don't think that was PommeDeTerre's intent. It looked to me that he just believed that the examples akkartik were bad enough to warrant pointing out. He didn't attempt to tie that into completely dismissing akkartik whole comment. And for the record, I don't agree with PommeDeTerre's comment at all because I think he missed the point akkatrik was making when he listed his examples.

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akkartik 13y ago

What would you consider a 'real' technology? (Does my node example qualify?) --- What's the difference between 'programming language' and 'dialect'? 'Supports macros' or 'uses parens in surface syntax' doesn't feel like enough reason to label Clojure a dialect. Supersets of specs are closer to 'dialects', like ISO C and gcc C, or Kawa scheme and guile. Racket seems to add enough extra feature that programmers are quite likely to leave base scheme in any program, so it doesn't feel like a dialect either. --- (Parenthetically, since I'd rather discuss the original argument: I mildly agree with my sibling comment by thedanfilter: arguing about definitions doesn't feel like the most interesting conversation to have here. It feels nitpicky; you didn't actually ever comment on my original argument itself: that large-scale habits reveal developers aren't hard to impress. Do you disagree with it, or just with the examples I chose? However, gravitating toward words like 'condescending' just adds more heat than light. Avoiding introducing incendiary distractions is hard; I'm not sure I'm succeeding in this comment. But comments here would be improved if we all tried harder not to take the bait. Maybe we should all try to skip past the first three comments we feel the urge to respond to every morning, or something.)