The Programming Steamroller Waits for No One (2013)

You know that (bad) old joke about Mexican food and how it's just beans, cheese, and tortillas in different arrangements? Software development is a lot like that. The same concepts float around and get recycled and repackaged into different formats. So the maxim about "plus ça change" is doubly true.

It's important to understand this though, because otherwise you just get bogged down in the miasma of "branding" of languages, frameworks, etc. Don't freak out about Ruby on Rails versus whatever, just understand the concerns addressed by these tools and how their approaches differ, and why those approaches might be good or bad in different situations.

It doesn't matter if Gulp is marginally better than Grunt, because they're both just APIs for running tasks. If you have some tasks, and they run, the delta between the task runner you use and the task runner you could be using is not important. Learning a new web framework (either in the sense of "new to you" or "the hot new thing") is not the same thing as getting better, however you define better.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7204515