Hacker News Reader

Comment by blr_traffic | Hacker News Reader

> an industry all too willing to throw away years of hard earned knowledge, experience and purpose built tools in order to chase the shiny tools the popular kids are using.

Why do you think people in the industry are doing this? There must be multiple factors behind this.

View on HN

My take on it is that it boils down to the profession being so young. Since it's so young we have a lot of young developers ( < 10 years experience). Programming is an inherently complex task [0]. Couple that with Not-Invented-Here and favoritism of barely working solutions (meaning by businesses: [1]) and as a result you get extremely fluctuating stacks. Every piece of code written by others was never written with care [2] - that is the assumption at least because more often that not it's true. Everyone in their own right thinks that only their code works well and has some special properties but in the end you face the exact same problems: problems of design rather than implementation.

[0] http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...: the business community, which, having been sold to the idea that computers would make life easier, is mentally unprepared to accept that they only solve the easier problems at the price of creating much harder ones

[2] See why Martin Fowler stresses Technical Excellence basically every time he get's on stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_y2pNj0zZg

New products, languages are products as well, help sell conferences, consulting, books, trainings, libraries, IDEs....

Naturally it only works in new markets, because for existing products the market is already saturated.

Also some kind of improvements are just impossible in existing languages either due the language semantics and libraries, or community resistance.

Growth. Our industry grows by 30% per year, bringing huge groups of unexperienced developers, trying their best to be pragmatic.

Secondly, education is focussed on what’s new, not on what has been well engineered.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com