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Comment by mjfisher | Hacker News Reader

> Don't you think that a lot of wizbang software developers just want to use latest and greatest buzzword thing

Yes, absolutely, and it drives me up the wall. I've seen some incredibly unsuitable technology choices made, the complexity of which have absolutely sunk productivity on projects.

That said, it's easy to become cynical and associate anything that's become recently popular with hype-driven garbage. But that can blind you to some really great new stuff too. I tend to hang behind the very early adopters and wait to see how useful new tech becomes in the wild - the "a year with X" style blog posts tend to be really informative.

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What's a good recent example of hype-driven software? The only good example I can think of is MongoDB. All the other hyped techs in recent memory I can think of were all objectively good: Nodejs, Reactjs, Docker, Kubernetes, etc. In the same vein, I laugh every time someone brings out "javascript framework flavor of the month". That hasn't been true for 5 years at least.

I think React would be a pretty good example of the kind of thing I'm talking about, actually. Just to be clear: I like React and I'm building a product with it right now of my own free choice. It does what it was built to do very well.

The point I'm trying to make is that people often think in absolute terms. The problem isn't thinking "React is good for SPAs" - it's thinking "React is good for all websites". I've come across a number of engineers now who genuinely think React is a good fit for e.g. totally static sites, "because it's fast".

I've come across similar persistent beliefs around NoSQL databases. Some teams wouldn't begin to consider an RDBMS for their primary data store, even while their data is heavily relational - because "SQL databases don't scale".

It's not that technologies are good or bad - it's the blind belief that a given technology is best for all situations. The hype drives the development. Not of the underlying tech itself, but in the teams using that tech.

Yeah I agree web dev has settled imo on React/npm/typescript/webpack. I like the stability. Hooks is there for some excitement though!

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