> There are technologies that people decide to use. Then there are technologies that people decide to make other people use. Design quality is much higher in the first category (badly-conceived ones die out) than in the second.
That's it: it's all in the selection process. If you select for the wrong reasons (such as "please the manager"), you'll get sub-par results.
Now, if we could tell for a fact that many technologies are selected for the wrong reasons, it would probably explain a good deal of the huge gap there is between "real world" IT and the state of the art. Think of it for a minute: in the 70s, we had Smaltalk, Scheme, and ML¹. Twenty freaking years later, the best mainstream IT can come up with is Java. Which only makes sense when you remember that Java has the highly familiar C syntax.
Apparently, backward compatibility warts aren't just for processor architectures.
That's it: it's all in the selection process. If you select for the wrong reasons (such as "please the manager"), you'll get sub-par results.
Now, if we could tell for a fact that many technologies are selected for the wrong reasons, it would probably explain a good deal of the huge gap there is between "real world" IT and the state of the art. Think of it for a minute: in the 70s, we had Smaltalk, Scheme, and ML¹. Twenty freaking years later, the best mainstream IT can come up with is Java. Which only makes sense when you remember that Java has the highly familiar C syntax.
Apparently, backward compatibility warts aren't just for processor architectures.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_programming_languag...