Within reason I agree, but in large part "technology fads" are actually evolution. The mood ring was a fad. Nobody knew what it was, then it happened, then it

Within reason I agree, but in large part "technology fads" are actually evolution. The mood ring was a fad. Nobody knew what it was, then it happened, then it went away again and everyone was fine. With technology that's largely not the case. What appear to be fads end up being evolutionary dead ends. [Possible HN heresy ahead] I'd put LISP business applicaiton development into this category. Prior to the AI craze, systems were developed in low level programming languages or mainframe business languages. Then LISP happened, but when the AI winter happened, did people go back to C/ASM/{the IBM languages}? No! C++, and later Java happened. For business Java will eventually superseded, but it's foolhardy to think people will regress to the languages of yesteryear -- time is marching forward. Being too stodgy or unwilling to invest in maintaining the business applications in current mainstream languages can put you in a precarious support situation in a relatively short (say a decade) time when people that are willing to do work in your system language are very expensive and no longer the best people in the industry. Obviously it's important to see through technology fads but starting from a position of skepticism may not play as well as it seems at first blush.