I certainly identify with your point, but I actually had the opposite reaction to this article; particularly the second half.
I started my career working on 'serious' software, then switched to web applications for a few years, and have recently settled into building multi-faceted, research-oriented systems -- and throughout the entire experience, I have consistently found myself having to apologize for the hype and hyperbole surrounding the many of the more modern technologies that I've wanted to work with.
Have a look at the HDF5 libraries... notice the Fortran support? That is a Huge positive for me, even though I hope to never write another line of Fortran in my life. Sometimes there is no 'selling' new tech to a CIO; it just needs to both appear and actually be absolutely solid (for lack of a better word).
Incidentally, I don't think this is a poorly titled article at all -- the author was being ironic, and will probably be rewarded with a 10x spike in traffic from people looking for talking points to take to their next Rails meetup... that's actually pretty funny.
Right but there's a difference between hype and experimentation with new tools and methodologies.
Cargo-culting is never a good idea. But to say that new and better techniques have not come out of (or been popularized by) new movements in software and business is simply false.
The stodginess and perhaps arrogance of academic and deeper research posts are just as obnoxious and hobbling as novelty-chasing unprincipled startup entrepreneur.
We should pick technologies because they're the right choice for the tasks we're trying to accomplish. Sometimes that requires reaching for tried and true technologies (POSIX ftw after all), but sometimes new technologies really do change the world, and we should do our best to encourage that.
Lastly, it's really just not true that all press is good press. You can gloss over occasional bad press with a much larger weight of good press, or converting a lot of bad press into good press with a small group of people (Palin's "Lamestream Media"), but bad press is just bad press.
Being known for starting flamewars w/o additional contributions to the community pretty quickly marks you as a troll.
My concern, one that I believe I share with the author, is that the zero-sum tenor of tech-community discourse is overshadowing the more fundamental advances (and setbacks) that we could be focused on. And the attitudes of what seems to be a generation of edit-line/update-browser developers is only making it that much more difficult to drag those advances into established industries.
I am genuinely disappointed with the present state of affairs, and therefore more willing to wade through an ocean of arrogance to find some intellectual merit.
I've just said that i believe that we should be using technology based on its merits. I think that is a separate issue from either whether new technology is always good/better than existing technologies, or whether we need to continue to support and encourage the development of new technologies (meh to the former, a definite yes to the latter).
Established industries on the other hand, need to get over themselves and actually track how new technologies can change and improve their businesses or fields, and I think that, yes, there's a danger of them getting snookered by glad-handing shysters just looking to sell them the hot new thing, but again, this is why it's so critical to have a solid understanding of technological change.
you don't have to wade through an ocean of crap technologies, if you have more finely honed crap detection skills. For example, Coffeescript is a solid and well thought out technology built on top of existing javascript semantics. I can tell almost immediately that it's a sensible and minimalist technology, developed with solid principles, and robust community support. Technologies like Objective-J/Cappuccino on the other hand, do not give me that sense. Sproutcore, up until recently, also seemed like a bloated technology, with a good core idea, but which had become overgrown and lost in it's subsequent iterations.
I am not a long-time Javascript developer, but, i have tastes and aesthetics about what i think is important in a development platform, and the sorts of qualities good ones should have. And the further I develop my javascript chops, the more confident i feel in my assessment.
It's more of an antecedent-consequent relationship than redirection, in my opinion.
Anyway, while your examples are instructive (I hadn't even heard of the latter three), they get right to the heart of my complaint: I simply don't worry about how to write individual web applications (though I wish some people would think about it a bit more... cough - quora - cough).
My immediate response to something like coffeescript, though, is to wonder what about how the grammar is defined. Could they do the same thing with antlr or xtext? are they already? how about python-lepl? and, finally, what are the core heuristics that all developers can take from a discussion of the above? I'm not at all interested in thinking about their 'square' function example - I'm sure it's plenty useful in some context.
Worry about what cognitively-tiny (that's not a pejorative - mk is powerful because it's tiny) framework to adopt, and reinforcement of one's choice through pervasive 'messaging' within the developer community, seem to go hand-in-hand. Conversely, since I don't worry about the former, I don't generally take part in the latter.
...
By the way - all this has started to sound overly stern to me - I'm really just sitting on my porch, doing a little good natured ranting about things I can't control.
Actually, yeah, Coffeescript is actually bootstrapped using Jison (a javascript implementation of Bison), and implemented in Coffeescript! :)
I should note that i think what's being done with Sproutcore now is pretty awesome. People like Yehuda Katz have done a good job of turning Sproutcore into a tech that has a solid conceptual foundation, and is aiming for ease of use for developing non-trivial javascript apps.
So, what do you worry about (and i mean that in a non-stern, genuinely curious way)? Web applications really are going to be the solid basis upon which a lot of future technology is built. A lot of pretty complex technology is going to be written in javascript (or things that compile to javascript). It really is a necessary step to see how to make javascript development more efficient and principled, so that there is a common basis for getting stuff done.
Yeah- You've definitely convinced me that I need to take a closer look at coffeescript. But I'd only be really interested if it could take something approaching OWLlink Functional syntax and generate code in any popular language, with my main concern being the ease of controlling exactly what is generated. Not because I think OWL Functional is 'better' than JS; I just think flexibility is an important criteria for judging the quality of tools along these lines.
I suppose I do worry about a few detail-ish things: the future of the disco/ddfs project now that Nokia is on the ropes... how to more closely integrate CLIPS rules with redis... if it is ok to let webmachine sit between nginx and an osgi process, or if I need to back-burner erlang for a while...
Don't get me wrong, I've written plenty of JS and expect to write plenty more, with or without node. But I'm also curious if I could ship a native component for chrome that dynamically loads a Xen vm that contains a 'heavy' application, with the UI written in whatever, that renders through an HTML5 canvas (check out the gnome3 html5 demo). I don't worry about it happening though: that's going to take care of itself. I just hope there are no patents or licenses to buy that would prevent me from shipping apps that way.
No, cargo-culting is a bad idea if you don't know why you would pick a piece of technology. I'm okay with technology being a crutch, and helping to carry you over terrain you do not yet understand. But that is different from using technology you do not understand for reasons you do not understand.
Just using a NoSQL store, because it's a NoSQL store is a bad idea, and can lead to all sorts of dangerous consequences.
I started my career working on 'serious' software, then switched to web applications for a few years, and have recently settled into building multi-faceted, research-oriented systems -- and throughout the entire experience, I have consistently found myself having to apologize for the hype and hyperbole surrounding the many of the more modern technologies that I've wanted to work with.
Have a look at the HDF5 libraries... notice the Fortran support? That is a Huge positive for me, even though I hope to never write another line of Fortran in my life. Sometimes there is no 'selling' new tech to a CIO; it just needs to both appear and actually be absolutely solid (for lack of a better word).
Incidentally, I don't think this is a poorly titled article at all -- the author was being ironic, and will probably be rewarded with a 10x spike in traffic from people looking for talking points to take to their next Rails meetup... that's actually pretty funny.