The Great Pendulum

This is reminiscent of the Hegelian dialectic. I'll probably misrepresent it, but as I understand it, it's the idea that society evolves slowly but surely through a constant three step process:

  - Society swings to one extreme (called the thesis)

  - Part of society reacts to the extreme and in the other direction, often to the extreme (the antithesis)

  - Society recognizes the downsides of both extremes and ends up somewhere in the middle (the synthesis)

This process might repeat multiple times, with each swing getting less extreme, or it might just need one go-round, but it generally matches a lot of human behavior I've seen. Whether programming paradigms, managing styles, political issues (over- vs. under-regulation), etc., this view seems to apply historically, and gives me a lot of hope for humanity's chances for eventual success in the long-term.

On the other hand, I may totally be misunderstanding the Hegelian dialectic, as I only was half listening in my intro to philosophy class, so if anyone here has corrections for me, I'd love to learn.

> In most instances the correct position lies somewhere near the equilibrium point

Or, perhaps, these trends are less generalizable than we'd like.

CoffeeScript!

Now there's a name ...

this is needlessly reductive. to me the steps forward aren't about finding the sweet spot but bulldozing al that stuff under with new paradigms. I would hope that eventually the server/client distinction just disappears from consideration. or that its aligned with something more important like data sovereignty than programmer convenience.