[defaultname]

I'm pretty in the dark about [new thing]. I don't have skills in it and really don't grok it. And even though it seldom gets mentioned, my insecurity about that gap in my knowledge -- that thing that makes my existing knowledge a little bit obsolete -- makes me laser focused on those instances where it does appear (Baader-Meinhof phenomenon of sorts): If one in a hundred posts mentions [new thing], I'll throw my hands up and complain about how these hipsters are trying to push this stuff down my throat at every venue. Maybe I'll no true scotsman in a futile effort to try to coerce people against talking about it, for instance by claiming that real pros don't actually talk about it at all, Fight Club style.

This has played out over, and over, and over again. Blockchain, NoSQL, JavaScript, Angular, "web3", Android, iOS, Swift, K8s, and on and on. Legitimate criticism gets drown out by people just fearful that something might take hold and then they're going to have to change how they do things or learn something new.

Eh.

[Lazare]

Quite right. On the other hand, plenty of other dumb technologies have launched, been mocked, and sunk without a trace (or worse) because they were just bad.

As Carl Sagan apparently said "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

And even when the technology itself has merit, it's absolutely true that some of the people who have complained about the technologies on your list (or OOP, or Go, or Electron apps, or many, many others) were doing it because this new technology devalued their skills and threatened them. But it's also true that valid criticisms of all of those exist, and all of those have been overhyped and oversold at least sometimes.

"Some people are threatened that NoSQL DBs may devalue their knowledge of SQL" can be true even as "shady startups are lying about the benefits of NoSQL" and "NoSQL DBs are not a panacea and SQL DBs will remain vital and omnipresent" are also true.

[dralley]

>They laughed at Columbus

They were right to laugh at Columbus. He thought the world was 3x smaller than it had been known to be for more than 1000 years. He was lucky he found the new world instead of starving to death halfway to India.

[ncmncm]

He probably didn't think that, but could not sell his project without getting potential investors to believe it. (At the time, nobody knew exactly how wide Asia was, although travel time on foot showed it was not as big as it would have to be.) Things haven't changed so much.

But he continued insisting, to his dying day, that he had reached Asia.

[ncmncm]

The overwhelming majority of things have been launched and soon sank with little trace just because they were not enough better than the competition. (I count Modula, D and C# among those, from different arenas.)

It is still far from clear whether Rust will achieve the miracle of becoming mainstream. That puts it far ahead of most languages, where it is obvious from the outset that they will fizzle.

[mdoms]

C#, a 21 year old programming language which consistently makes it into the top 6 programming languages by popularity in all methodologies of measuring, "launched and soon sank with little trace"? That's an interesting take.

[ncmncm]

Hope springs eternal.

We can be pretty confident, anyway, that it won't outlive Microsoft.

[kobebrookskC3]

is that saying anything if microsoft is basically eternal? what, you think the company that makes excel and windows is gonna go out of business any time soon?

[ncmncm]

The usual route is becoming irrelevant. Windos failed to achieve relevance in mobile and cloud, and desktops become less relevant every day. If at some point you don't need MS to do excel anymore, MS becomes irrelevant there, too.

There are still Burroughs, Univac, and Honeywell computer companies, in a way, but they attract no attention.