[ijidak]

My favorite was when everyone was looking for prompt engineers.

I was trying to understand what prompt engineering was, because I thought there is no way this is a discipline for how to ask ChatGPT questions... And then I realized it was...

Sure, I get that there is much to learn regarding formulating effective prompts, but a new career path?

[fuzztester]

hype is the deeply engrained norm in our industry, bro. just sit it out. as that famous saying says, "this too shall pass.".

until the next one, of course. ;)

for example, in rough order, some past hype trends: 3GLs, structured programming, initial AI (then AI winter), expert systems, CASE tools, 4GLs, OOP/OOAD, UML and round trip engineering, design patterns, dot com boom (and bust), agile, functional programming, Web 2.0, SaaS, crypto, Web 3.0, big data, data science, ML/AI.

most of them had or have some actual benefits, but nothing like the hype parrotted, by those with and without vested interests.

been there, seen them, from the third or fourth one onwards.

[fuzztester]

also, see this cperciva comment, and Google who he is before replying:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40957064

somewhat corroborates what I said above.

[fuzztester]

just had a small insight and did some quick mental arithmetic. hold on to your seat:

i counted, it's about 20 hype trends that i listed above (and don't forget that I may have missed some).

it is roughly 6 decades since the computer industry started, taking a start year of 1960.

so, 20 / 6 gives us an average rate of over 3 hype trends per decade !!!

about one every 3.3 years.

I myself would have thought it would be less often.

even if you make it 7 decades, 20 / 7 is nearly 3, so is still in the same ball park.

phew.

[defrost]

Way more if you go full international ...

Remember Fifth Generation Computer Systems ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...

[fuzztester]

oh yeah, the big Japanese attempt with prolog. I read about it at the time.