[pydry]

This (and a few other similar articles) make me feel that there ought to be more emphasis on recognizing "good novelty" vs "bad novelty" rather than "more novelty" vs "less novelty".

The word "budget" frames the question wrongly, I think.

If there are 4 new technologies on a project and the team were insistent that they each solved a lot of pain I'd be less averse than I would to 1 new technology that they adopted because it was "cool", "made by google" and "everybody [cool] is using it".

[bad416f1f5a2]

> If there are 4 new technologies on a project and the team were insistent that they each solved a lot of pain I'd be less averse than I would to 1 new technology that they adopted because it was "cool", "made by google" and "everybody [cool] is using it".

Programmers always insist that the new flavor of X solves a ton of pain. Occasionally they are right, but more often than not programmers adopting four new technologies- if they ship at all - deliver what Rich Hickey called “a knit house” in one of his talks: a system that solves a problem, sometimes in a pretty way, but is never able to be extended or grow. Sometimes the actual software is fine enough, but the choices are so novel that it ends up being maintained by one or two people who get it, and growing the team is a nightmare. Either way, it’s a knit house.