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by mechanical_fish
5630 days ago
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I think the whole premise of this question is kind of... off. Just about every tool goes through a period of being hyped. That's why we use them. Show me a tool that hasn't been hyped and I'll show you a tool that not enough people know about. Complaints that things are "overhyped" are dubious. Everything is overhyped to some degree. What would an "optimal" amount of hype be, and how would you regulate it? If you underhype your product, you are leaving profit on the table. To maximize the number of satisfied customers, you must ultimately run your product past many, many people who ultimately won't be satisfied customers. Meanwhile, I can't help but fear that this poll is just another measurement of popular fashion: Once a technology has found its niche, can we really judge its ultimate importance without being experts in the niche? We can all tell when something becomes unfashionable, but it's quite hard to know just what its ongoing impact really is. Unfashionable technologies fade into the woodwork, but they do vital work nonetheless. Was COBOL overhyped? Was Perl overhyped? Can I really claim that XML was overhyped, even as I type words into a machine built largely out of XML-based config files? When I pound the table and declare that, say, Java was overhyped, am I really saying more about myself than I am about Java? I have a vision of myself, walking around the room while using my iPhone to compose a message claiming that tablet computers and robots are overhyped, and then tripping over my Roomba. |
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