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Comment by epo | Hacker News Reader

Oh please. Come back in 10 or 20 years time and say it is not a fad. Technology cycles are getting so compressed that everything is a fad now. The whole thing being fuelled by the immature and inexperienced who know nothing about the past and consequently think they have nothing to learn from it.

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Our industry could really do without this type of condescending, unhelpful attitude.

Big deal. Concepts are being repeated and technology stacks are stealing ideas from one another. Remind me again how that is a bad thing ? The fact is that there is no perfect solution to every problem.

Concepts and good ideas being repeated and stolen is great!

However, the problem is repeating mistakes. Go's nullability, lack of generics, ... Node doing manual CPS where past work (e.g: Haskell) does non-blocking IO without forcing manual CPS on the programmer.

It would be nice if we learned not to repeat past mistakes...

The problem lies in that not everyone agrees on what are mistakes and what isn't. I know a lot of go programmers who do not want generics. Many also disagree that manual CPS is a mistake.

I think the majority of people who disagree that nullability everywhere is a mistake, as an example, are people who've only ever used languages that had that bug.

If anything, it's a good thing that the cycles are getting shorter. There's more ideas going around between languages, more experimentation, etc. Language evolution is accelerating and it's exciting.

But when do you hit the line on when things are fad or not? 5 years, 10 years, 20 years? How about 50 years?

The word "fad" is being redefined as the cycles are getting shorter. Maybe Node, Ruby, Go are/(will be) all just 10 year fads, but when do we redefine the word to be more appropriate?

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