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Comment by mrits | Hacker News Reader

I think it is closer to a 13 year old doing something that they have spent years practicing, such as a piano recital.

Sure, sometimes it is, undeniably. But given how immature in general this industry is--and that means both in terms of the span of its existence and in terms of the age of practitioners--it sure is suspicious how often X-that-has-been-around-forever-implented-in-Y comes up.

I mean how likely is it that "Hashtable/JS interpreter/JVM implemented in C" is going to be a big hit on HN? Not often. But since Go, JavaScript, and other insert new hotness language here are popular things somehow it's more interesting to retread old ideas with them. That's not the sign of a young master demonstrating his skill, it is the sign of an immature field that hasn't figured out how to distinguish what is new and important from what isn't.

It's unfortunate in particular for the people who do do these projects for fun or learning. These people have their work hijacked for a showoff culture's mutual backpatting.

A similar thing happens with browser technology. "Look at this amazing WebGL demo!" The thing is, the only interesting thing is that OpenGL can be accessed from JavaScript in the browser. After that, it's just lots of people rehashing demos that were done years ago, but people continue to be impressed because it's in a browser.

So we're all wasting our time. Some people find more interesting ways to do it than others.

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