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Comment by dexen | Hacker News Reader

There is reinventing the wheel and reinventing the wheel.

It's cute when a person, learning as she goes, comes up with something that's been already invented. Only goes to show she understands the field. [1]

It's unbelievably irritating when something that was widely implemented 10 or 20 or 30 years ago (and then even improved significantly) is now asserted as the next big thing. C'mon, be serious -_-' [2]

[1] a nice guy thinks of swap (in userspace) just to hold strings of arbitrary length, calls it ``backed by file storage'': http://9fans.net/archive/2011/02/94

[2] no example I can think of ATM; but perhaps the above one could fit?

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There are lots of examples for [2], but we should avoid listing them as they'll lead to arguments.

In fact, we should also avoid listings for [1] since that can lead to anger venting.

[2]http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152.abstract Well, not really 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. More like 400 years ago.

Garbage collection back in the 90's. Java really ran with that one.

"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

- Guy Steele, Java spec co-author

http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html

For [2], I'd normally suggest the thin client... except that it's got enough momentum that it may actually be the next big thing.

Heh, perhaps Sun's demise helped thin client in a way? ;-)

For [2]--NoSQL.

Well yes and no.

On one hand, NoSQL as ``let's ditch relational'' is [2] squared; especially as ditching relational because of SQL is ditching the only thing good about SQL.

On the other hand, if NoSQL would mean ``let's have relational language better than SQL'', they hey, that's good!

It's been tried [a] even before the SQL and tried [b] since then. It's not easy for something new to get traction with all the SQL code out there. But we will arrive there some day.

[a] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBL

[b] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_manifesto

NB., if you attack a hot & popular topic, you better provide some argumentation, or you will be downvoted to the ground :-(

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