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by strulovich 1102 days ago
If new is not always better, then you’re stuck with the really hard job of knowing when it’s worth moving to the new thing.

Worse, you’ll be blinded by survivability bias. One easily notices the good rewrites and can easily ignore the bad ones.

Even worse, bad rewrites may be noticed in a place that a year or two ago was deemed a success story. I’ve seen many such cases due to misunderstandings or just political dynamics.

And lastly, don’t let that Engineer do Scala, they’ll brush off the compilation time regression and make all developers lives slightly worse (assuming the project is big enough)

1 comments

Yeah, good point--when I said new wasn't always better, I was just talking about the case where the new tech solves a problem, but it's not the one you have.

Like choosing GraphQL just because it's new, even if your data doesn't have the structure for it.

Will have to disagree with you on Scala for several reasons I won't go into here--but the point was just that, in order to make these arguments in the first place, you need to do your research. Seems commonsense, but surprisingly many people don't do it (including younger me).