Embracing “Old” Tech
blogs.newardassociates.com
Embracing “Old” Tech
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Embracing “Old” Tech
#2Why are there so many articles like this written? Who are they for?
> New technology is always better than old technology
No one believes this.
Re: Embracing “Old” Tech
#3Why are there so many articles like this written? Who are they for? > New technology is always better than old technology No one believes this.
> Who are they for?
You can determine who something is for by looking at who is paying for it. This one is provided to us for free and without any obvious source of third-party revenue (e.g. advertising), so, like HN comments, it is no doubt for the author.
Re: Embracing “Old” Tech
#4I live in a world on the trailing edge.
Sometimes the best of the last generation is better than the new of the next. While I don't know how strongly this author makes that case, it's true in a general sense.
Re: Embracing “Old” Tech
#5Heads up to the author in case you’re here, you reference a tweet about Next.js but subsequently refer to it as “Nest”.
Re: Embracing “Old” Tech
#6New tech allows people new into the field to be on the same level playing field as the salty folks who have been in the trenches for a while.
Re: Embracing “Old” Tech
#7Why are there so many articles like this written? Who are they for? > New technology is always better than old technology No one believes this.
No, nobody _says_ this. An enormous number of people make statements that imply they believe this.
Honestly, that’s one of the common criticisms I see of HN: That it’s full of people who believe they’re doing something new when they’re just recreating something old, but because theirs is new it’s better, usually because of why it’s new. (Blank but in Rust, Blank but in Go, blank but in JavaScript…)
In my own experience, this was demonstrated most starkly by how suddenly Subversion became “terrible” when everyone decided to switch to git, while many of the same people considered it great when they were switching to Subversion from CVS. And the same for the SCCS+clones to CVS transition.
Re: Embracing “Old” Tech
#8I live in a world on the trailing edge. Sometimes the best of the last generation is better than the new of the next. While I don't know how strongly this author makes that case, it's true in a general sense.
These days a generation (major version) can be under a year.
How far back do you lag to feel safe?
Re: Embracing “Old” Tech
#9Heads up to the author in case you’re here, you reference a tweet about Next.js but subsequently refer to it as “Nest”.
Was about to post this!
Re: Embracing “Old” Tech
#10There is one issue not mentioned in the article: authors of "old" tech quite often abandon it while developing a fancy new version, so the choice is not the imaginary one between old and new, the choice is real between abandoned and not-yet-ready.
Abandonment would not be a problem in a stable environment (see, Clojure libraries last touched in 2014 don't need any maintenance, and old Go libraries usually need just a bit of touch-up), but in a chaotic environment of most other languages abandoned library bitrots immediately.