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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just the circles in which I've been active lately, but I feel like a lot of time and effort is spent these days practically just moving code around between implementations, without much practical change in user experience.

What drives this behaviour? I mean the question on a deeper level. An answer like "the technology hype cycle" just begs the question. Why does someone feel like they have to move business logic onto a particular framework (and then realise it's a mistake and move it again to a different framework that's similar to the one they started on?)

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I think it's somewhat similar to the "not invented here" syndrome, but more of a "not invented now" syndrome.

People (rightly or wrongly) believe the new technology is better suited to their problems.

That also somewhat begs the question! What makes them believe that?

We are constantly bombarded with the idea that society is progressing - towards.. "something" - and change means "good", because "moving forward". Ergo, yesterday's things are inherently worse.

IMO I think that's at least part of the issue.

There's also the common notion that movement seems productive. If you are not moving, what are you doing? This effect happens on a lot of levels. Especially managers have to show they are moving needles. Any movement is better than no movement.

I think that one factor is that staying on old tech is a risky career move both for the individual and the business. At work we have an Angular (the old one) app and while many new devs pick up some React, they definitely don't play around with ancient Angular versions for fun. So now we're stuck with a pretty big app using tech no one is interested in anymore.

Partly due to frontend framework hype, I would say. If we take traditional backend web frameworks, like lets say Django, you could simply look for Django devs and would find plenty, even though it exists for a long time. Choosing a hyped JS framework is what is the risky move, because people jump ship quickly. There are design decisions in Angular for which I would never even consider Angular for development.

When angular.js came when you needed to do something highly interactive it's competitors used to be either amature hour hipster shit frameworks or hacking stuff using jquery.

The web browser is both a critical UI technology - it's the only working truly cross platform sandbox - and therefore a battlefield between potential monopolists that has stagnated like a WW1 field of trenches and wire.

Because only the tiniest, most incremental changes can be made to the browsers, and because there are fundamental native/universality conflicts all the time, making tiny improvements to UX requires huge behind the scenes troop movements. And then it's subjective, so maybe it just makes the UX worse in the end.

UI frameworks seem to be surprisingly hard conceptually. Neither Microsoft nor Apple have really proven that they can do better when on a field entirely under their control.

Not to mention business model considerations, such as the worsening of Reddit.

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