The problem with your model is that it relies on there being “proven” technologies to begin with, but who is going to prove them if not those very groups you deride? You’re proving the necessity of the early adopters and hype suckers if anything.
Couldn't one make the point that those early adopters in orgs that can afford to take on the risks pave the way for everyone else? And eventually, once some technologies survive and others die off for a variety of reasons, people with deadlines to meet (more limited amount of time and resources to invest in getting something working) can just build off of the success of others?
>The problem with your model is that it relies on there being “proven” technologies to begin with
This takes overthinking to a new level. Of course there are proven technologies - used with success for decades, known for their stability, etc. I'm pretty sure one can find arguments against any of them. But we do have a general (not unanimous) consensus, even if it hasn't been cast into stone. For example that Python is tried and mature for data science, or that C++ has proven itself in games, and Java in enterprise and application server programming, and so on.
>but who is going to prove them if not those very groups you deride
Actual domain experience from millions of developers, and observation of decade(s) of use, stability, and known upsides/downsides?
Nobody waited for hipster programmers to declare mature technologies. Their "job" is to hype new stuff. If it evolves into something mature, they go to the next shiny thing.
The dividing line between hipster programmers and “engineers” is nonexistent. They are just other programmers. Those millions of developers didn’t hop on the bandwagon just because Java was sitting there, it required a lot of forward-thinking, high-skill people to get off the ground. And they were hipsters at the time.
>Those millions of developers didn’t hop on the bandwagon just because Java was sitting there, it required a lot of forward-thinking, high-skill people to get off the ground. And they were hipsters at the time.
Nah, I was there "at the time", and this is bad example. Java got traction because of marketing to corporate departments, not because of "forward-thinking, high-skill people" driving it. It was literally the first language that came with a full blown, tens-of-millions, commercial hype campaign.
In any case, the early adopters were neither "hipsters" nor more mature "engineer" types. It was the duped-by-hipsters types, but at that time enticed by marketing.
The kind of hipsters described above and in abundance 2023 (or even 2010) sense hardly existed back then (Java caught on during 1997-2000), and even when, very rarely, they did, they didn't have the means and captive audience to make their hype be adopted (people hyped things like Ada, Smalltalk, Lisp, Eiffel, and other lost causes). Back then it was mostly marketing driven hype, sold to corporate decision makers.
Modern hipster devs came about with blogs, social media, the proliferation of conferences, the rise of startups as we know them today when they recovered after the dot-com boom,
and companies like Google and Facebook fighting it out for developer influence.
You wrote about me deriding bald people in this thread (telling me it's bad "to deride people who have no hair"). My response above was about that: that I did no such thing. I mentioned bald people vs people with hair as an example of a sorites ("no clear boundaries") problem. Not to cluster them with hype-promoting developers (that doesn't even make sense).
As for the others types that you mention, sure: the very purpose of the original comment was to deride people promoting hype.
It's impressive the lengths you'll go to avoid seeing the point. My message is, don't write off people just because they appear to be hipsters. Similar to people lacking hair, who are oftentimes the SAME persons as those people having hair, the developers participating in new technologies are often the same as the ones writing in mature codebases.
The "hair' argument becaome so convoluted I don't even know where to address, so let's address your main concern.
Are we allowed to write off people's activity for any reason? Dislike certain trends people follow? Criticize some tendencies or bad habbits? If so, I chose to criticize hype-merchants and write them off (regarding that aspect of their life, I'm sure they could still be wonderful parents, or golf players, or whatever otherwise).
That is what happens when you bring up unrelated topics like hair in a discussion about developers.
The question is, write them off as what? Because as we already established, it requires developers in order to make a technology “mature.” So how does it make sense to write those developers off, when they are necessary to the creation of the thing you want?
I don't find that the process of making a technology mature is the same as it's mass adoption as the hyped new thing.
If anything, the latter leads to the opposite: tons of immature technologies, hyped to high heaven, used by tons of developers who don't know any better, and then discarded as a new shiny thing comes along. Discarded both by users, and their limited-attention-span creators.
> "Newest technologies" are for early adopters and hype suckers. Engineers use proven technologies, not just "newer" for the sake of it.
This is in total opposition to the way I was taught engineering.
New technologies get used in products and projects all the time. There's a discipline called risk analysis where the pros, cons and risks of technological choices are weighted-in to take a decision on whether or not to incorporate them.
The more a given tech is used, the better it's understood, making it less risky to incorporate into larger products.
Engineers also fall victim to hype from time to time, because engineers are human.
It's part of an engineering mindset to trust proven technology, but it's also part of an engineering mindset to make sure you're staying up-to-date with critical changes in your field. Ignoring either for long enough will make you a worse engineer.
>Engineers also fall victim to hype from time to time, because engineers are human.
Sure, just like everybody has shat themselves one time or another, at the very least as a toddler, but perhaps also when they had to make a long run to a remote bathroom after Taco Bell. But there are really people suffering from severe diarrhoea too, and those are two distinct groups.
It's not that engineers are immune to hype. It's that the others are hype-magnets and hype-spreaders.
Doesn't this imply that "hype-magnets" and "hype-spreaders" ("the others") aren't engineers, or couldn't be?
Engineers aren't some special class of human with special brains or pseudo-Vulcan logic that makes it impossible for us to be just as hype-spreading as anyone else.
Is that an accussation though, or a compliment?
"Newest technologies" are for early adopters and hype suckers. Engineers use proven technologies, not just "newer" for the sake of it.