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Disclaimer: I am a web developer, so these criticisms include myself. I feel like so many folks (me included) in the web development community are constantly r

Disclaimer: I am a web developer, so these criticisms include myself. I feel like so many folks (me included) in the web development community are constantly re-learning new (old) techniques that we all really should have realized long before now. Though I don't think I would change a thing as I've learned a lot over the past decade that I probably never would have if it not for this community. Sometimes I just get a sense of deja vú, like none of this is new... This whole "Unicorn" business for example. I read about this last week, and thought to myself, "Ok... hasn't Apache been doing this with 2.0 for years?" So isn't this just re-implementing the wheel... yet again, but in Ruby?

gfodor 17y ago
Someone once gave me an incredibly apt analogy for this phenomenon: technology is like a helix. It repeats itself but at the same time increasingly gets better. See: cloud computing, AJAX, NoSQL, and all the other things that are purported to be new ideas but are really re-hashes of 30-40 year old ways of thinking with contemporary tools.
tptacek 17y ago
Apache has been doing this since there was an Apache.
dschobel 17y ago
Of course it is reinventing the wheel. And people will continue to post ebullient posts about it until they start studying formal cs theory and stop mistaking the implementations details ("java gets closures! c# gets lambda expressions! new web stack for perl!") as the interesting bits. It's just a given that the majority of the ideas posted to programming blogs are just old ideas in new contexts.