Joaquim Verges ⚡
Tim BrayThis is actually not about XML, despite the title, it's about us geeks being fashion victims, and I really enjoyed reading it. https://www.bitecode.dev/p/hype-cycles
alcinnz@timbray The source of so much frustration for me...
Matěj Cepl 🇪🇺 🇨🇿 🇺🇦I generally agree with the main theme of the article, but I have some problems with
> I was lucky to learn this lesson very early in my career: there is no silver bullet, any single tool, …
Yes, but. It is very interesting to me how this doesn't seem to be true about our tools. There is no endless numbers of VCS systems and all non-git seem to be more or less dead. There are two big C compilers, but other one was made alive only by the tremendous effort of Apple. Etc.
Eric Carroll@timbray
Making it harder often means making it more interesting. 🤔
Making it harder often means making it more interesting. 🤔
jnbhlr@EricCarroll @timbray why not keeping it simple and moving to more complex, interesting problems?
glyn@timbray Spot on. Shame hype cycles take so long to dissipate. 5-10 years?
Stanislav Ochotnický@timbray oh that article hits so many hyped things I've already managed to forget. Ignorance was bliss...
Claudius Link@timbray
Great but painful article
Great but painful article
Paul Chernoff@timbray @lisamelton Nice article. Another issue is when your new developers latch on to the newest fad not for the good of the company but to position themselves for their next job.
Disclaimer: I've been doing a little XSLT for the past 15 years. Every time I have to update an XSLT I remember that I would prefer hitting my head against the wall.
Tom Walker@timbray This is fine but.i never understand why people think the moral of the story is "use the right tool for the job!"
The moral is "some tools are rubbish but have a lot of hype, avoid".
Eric Dobbs@timbray, I love this. And it also makes me sad. I wrote the same story in 2012, which I offer now as supporting evidence, more than self-promotion.
https://dobbse.net/thinair/2012/11/framework-is-not-architecture.html
"As an industry we still don't know how to teach what we do. The only way to learn these lessons is to join a revolution and experience the transformation to establishment. This advice-disguised-as-a-story is for programmers starting their second rodeo."
What are the chances the next generation will break this pattern?
@timbray @mononcqc I wanna connect these threads. Fred reviewed a book chapter of an ethnographic look at software devs and legacy code and it is entirely consistent with these war stories of hype cycles.
https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-unruly-bodies-of-code-in-time.html
https://ferd.ca/notes/paper-unruly-bodies-of-code-in-time.html
hamish campbell
Janne Moren@timbray
That's pretty much the past 20 years in one depressing nutshell.
Excellent writeup. Wish the author had an RSS feed...
Kennymatic@timbray we pretty much stuck to the same backend stack for 15 years and going at my last job. It was boring but it mostly worked for us going from basement start up to serving hundreds of utility companies around the globe. It did however make hiring difficult as we never used the hot new tools.
aiuto@timbray That was a "comforting" read. It's another person eloquently explaining what I have learned to be true over decades of writing software. It's nice to have that confirmation that others have reached the same conclusions as you.
nantucketlit@timbray Back in web dev class some years ago: "You have to learn React!" "No, Angular is better!" Six months later: "React is terrible, you need to learn Vue."
Tim Gent@timbray well, I recognise only a fraction of the terms used but I love this!
I think there's also a type if hype which uses a new term for essentially the same thing.
Data warehousing, data mining, big data, data lakes and many aspects of blockchain, smart cities, machine learning and the Metaverse all sell the same utopian concept (mash all the data together & wonderful things happen) but none of them can deliver fully on the hype because real data is messy & managing it is HARD.
I think there's also a type if hype which uses a new term for essentially the same thing.
Data warehousing, data mining, big data, data lakes and many aspects of blockchain, smart cities, machine learning and the Metaverse all sell the same utopian concept (mash all the data together & wonderful things happen) but none of them can deliver fully on the hype because real data is messy & managing it is HARD.
Amadeus Maximilian@timbray this resonates with me. I never understood why people were wilfully making things harder for themselves... But nowadays I think it's either ignorance (everybody is using it, so it can't be bad) or boredom (I've built this stack a thousand times, how can I make it more interesting, there's got to be a better way). 😅
C64tone@timbray I stopped coding professionally when this BS started (JS frameworks out the arse, and Zend)
T.J. Crowder@timbray Worth the read just for the list of Flux implementations alone. I was _sure_ they were just riffing toward the end...until they linked to evidence. 👀
nn1ng
Barry Mieny 
@timbray I shouldn’t have read this, as it reminded me of the huge difference between what I do for side projects and what we’re expected to do in a professional context. I know that the projects don’t compare in any way, but the general business approach seems completely over-engineered.
Kevin Granade has moved@timbray I feel crazy sometimes because the first time I see these things I'm like, nope, that sounds crappy. Then there's wave after wave praising the obviously crappy barely functional thing.
John Maxwell@timbray This helped me decide to build my static website with a shell script after all. Thank you.
@timbray A positive blogpost to complement this would be https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/03/23/your-tech-toolbox-the-middle-ground-between-tech-chaos-and-rigidity/
