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It's not "CS knowledge" that causes tech fashion to change over time. CS knowledge hasn't actually changed very much in the last 30 years. The people that desig

by guelo 12y ago

It's not "CS knowledge" that causes tech fashion to change over time. CS knowledge hasn't actually changed very much in the last 30 years. The people that designed SQL knew all about the advantages and tradeoffs of "NoSQL" key-value stores. The impedance mismatch of ORM Object-SQL systems has been studied for decades. If anything changes it's the engineering "best practices", like unit testing methodologies. But mostly it's just fashion, and who has the biggest platforms and marketing budgets for pushing their framework. Software development as a field sucks, no one really knows what they're doing. We're all just figuring it out as we go along. As he says in the article: "We think that the current shiny best way is the end of history; that it will never be superseded or seen to be suspect with hindsight."

guard-of-terra 12y ago
"The people that designed SQL knew all about the advantages and tradeoffs of "NoSQL" key-value stores" I think they could not possibly imagine fitting the whole working set into server's RAM. Which changes quite a lot.
- jghn 12y ago
  That doesn't mean that the knowledge wasn't there, just that there were different tradeoffs being made back then. I disagree w/ the GP that it's purely about fashion, but certainly there distinct pendulums which swing back and forth in our field. IMO that pendulum isn't purely driven by fancy alone (i.e. fashion) but also changes in computing power. For instance the ever driving swing of the local driven/server driven architecture. These days it's called "cloud" but it's gone by other names in the past. At some point the demands of the applications demand too much for the network traffic/network storage/etc and an increasing amount of work is offloaded to the local client. And then, at some point even further in the future there's an advance on the capabilities of remote computing (e.g. network bandwith) and the cycle repeats itself.

by guelo 12y ago

guard-of-terra 12y ago

"The people that designed SQL knew all about the advantages and tradeoffs of "NoSQL" key-value stores" I think they could not possibly imagine fitting the whole working set into server's RAM. Which changes quite a lot.

jghn 12y ago
That doesn't mean that the knowledge wasn't there, just that there were different tradeoffs being made back then. I disagree w/ the GP that it's purely about fashion, but certainly there distinct pendulums which swing back and forth in our field. IMO that pendulum isn't purely driven by fancy alone (i.e. fashion) but also changes in computing power. For instance the ever driving swing of the local driven/server driven architecture. These days it's called "cloud" but it's gone by other names in the past. At some point the demands of the applications demand too much for the network traffic/network storage/etc and an increasing amount of work is offloaded to the local client. And then, at some point even further in the future there's an advance on the capabilities of remote computing (e.g. network bandwith) and the cycle repeats itself.