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Could you elaborate on this a bit ? I mean , is it feasible for the ordinary developer to engage in a multi-year risky R&D project that might ultimately fail r

Could you elaborate on this a bit ? I mean , is it feasible for the ordinary developer to engage in a multi-year risky R&D project that might ultimately fail resulting in nothing ? Most people barely have any time to code. It's just because Github is your Resume (TM) that makes most people crank out their own Javascript framework so they can have it on their resume. Could you give any examples of any such long term one man personal R&D efforts ?

kamaal 11y ago
There is big difference between doing new things, and doing the same things(again and again) with new tools. Take the this whole big data craze for example, almost every body I see who wants to use these tools doesn't have a use case for it. The same with NoSQL. Or Twitter's Storm. When you subscribe to this way of software development, you start shoe horning your use cases into wrong design paradigms, leading to a lot of maintenance work. This doesn't happen just in the backend. It happens even with FE frameworks. How many people have a use case for react or other jazzy frameworks? A crude example I can give you is, this is like developing all your applications in awk or sed because that's fashionable currently. You are shoe horning your problems into solutions paradigms they don't belong to.
- gedrap 11y ago
  Great comment and I completely agree with you. Programmers have a tendency to detach themsleves from the business where software is there to maximize the profit. It doesn't matter whether it's written in PHP, Ruby, or [language of the year] [0]. But if you let the programmers go wild, many of them have a tendency to pick the hottest thing just because [some reason that has no advantage from business POV]. I guess that's the sign of boredom. Programming is fun, playing with new toys is fun, but it should not be forgotten that it's part of the business. [0] Well, it sort of matters. Dev time costs money, good tools and languages will make you write it faster therefore maximizing money. But that's not what I am talking about here.

kamaal 11y ago

There is big difference between doing new things, and doing the same things(again and again) with new tools. Take the this whole big data craze for example, almost every body I see who wants to use these tools doesn't have a use case for it. The same with NoSQL. Or Twitter's Storm. When you subscribe to this way of software development, you start shoe horning your use cases into wrong design paradigms, leading to a lot of maintenance work. This doesn't happen just in the backend. It happens even with FE frameworks. How many people have a use case for react or other jazzy frameworks? A crude example I can give you is, this is like developing all your applications in awk or sed because that's fashionable currently. You are shoe horning your problems into solutions paradigms they don't belong to.

gedrap 11y ago
Great comment and I completely agree with you. Programmers have a tendency to detach themsleves from the business where software is there to maximize the profit. It doesn't matter whether it's written in PHP, Ruby, or [language of the year] [0]. But if you let the programmers go wild, many of them have a tendency to pick the hottest thing just because [some reason that has no advantage from business POV]. I guess that's the sign of boredom. Programming is fun, playing with new toys is fun, but it should not be forgotten that it's part of the business. [0] Well, it sort of matters. Dev time costs money, good tools and languages will make you write it faster therefore maximizing money. But that's not what I am talking about here.