Like all industries we can't just stay still. Curiosity and creativity are important. The "olives" are a fruit of some sort of older technology that has matured. Maybe this technology was the "shiny new some some time back then" Some people try to fix the the shortcommings from yesterday's technology with their own ideas and view of things and nobody can prevents this. This is just basic, human creativity at work.

Maybe what's important is not making people belive that yesterday's technology is obsolete and should be burried or abandoned. The shiny new thing is just an other tool in the toolbox and it's not because I created a new shape of screw that all the other screws are worthless. There is still plenty of screws all over the world that need to be unscrewed, we need those tools to do that, people to know how to work with them and some of these screws still need to be made. Maybe people don't talk about these screws as much ? They don't make the news anymore because they've been there for so long ?

Maybe the point here is that social media thrives on the shiny new thing, it's the core concept of it. An old news paper is worthless, no one ever sold an older news paper. So they need to grab some attention to live and the shiny new thing is a way to accomplish that.

But it's not because there is lots of articles about all those new frameworks that the older ones are worthless. We need both. Maybe for some projects we will not choose an architecture based on 10 years old concepts and frameworks and some other projects need stability and a whole tested and stable toolchain and documentation for the years to come.

What kind of work do you want to accomplish ? Small projects where you work alone ? Where you just serve a few people ? Or big projects with a huge infrastructure that needs to deliver to millions with great economic impact ?

I bet you don't use a hammer only when you want to build kitchen furniture. And then tools that are needed in a factory that build kitchen furniture are not the same that the ones that needs to be used for home. They need a whole supply toolchain, some testing & quality checking. Whereas the worksman in his own workshop is going to have less tools ...

We need all kinds of software and technology, maybe what's hard is to be able to identify the right ones and defining precisely what we want and where we think we will go. People are always going to want to try to use the shiny new thing. We all need novelty, enhancing the shortcommings of your current tools.

The reality is that there is very little actual innovation happening in programming. Most of the ideas in use today have been discovered decades ago. The big reason for churn is that people don't bother learning about what's been done before, and keep reinventing the wheel.

You don't see in other disciplines such as physics or chemistry where people spend years learning about existing research before actually starting to contribute.

With programming the barrier to starting to write code is much lower than to actually learning the background research. People don't bother looking at what's been done already, and just start "inventing" things.

More often than not this result in half baked ideas because the authors of projects don't really think about the full scope of the problem. Then once the project starts hitting limits in practice, people start kludging things on top of it, and eventually it becomes unwieldy to use. Then somebody comes by and does the same thing simplistically again, and the cycle repeats. Nothing new is learned in this process, and you get churn for the sake of churn.

> Most of the ideas in use today have been discovered decades ago. The big reason for churn is that people don't bother learning about what's been done before, and keep reinventing the wheel.

But on the other side of the coin, do you really want to be locked into a decades-old solution to a "solved problem" forever? Or are there still improvements that can be made to reduce friction and human error?

"Machine/human readable data exchange format? Yeah, that's a solved problem - we use XML for that. What's that? You want to reinvent the wheel? JavaScript Object Notation, are you insane? Didn't you bother seeing which exchange formats are already out there? XML can already do everything JSON can do and more! Plus, JavaScript is the exact opposite of what we value here, get that crap out of my face; like I said, XML is the one true solution to data exchange and forever will be."

XML and JSON are both examples of the problem actually. S-expressions have existed since the 50s, and they solve all the same problems with a much saner syntax. In fact, if Mozilla marketing execs didn't insist on Java style syntax for Js, and it kept Scheme style syntax we wouldn't even need HTML and CSS today. We'd have a single syntax that would cleanly express code, styling, and layout.

S-expressions do not have typed standards for serializing dates and booleans like JSON. They also can't distinguish numbers from text.

S-expressions also have no standard for comments, and can't distinguish maps from lists.

A S-expression based serialization standard would be a bit cleaner than JSON, but it's enough of a change that it's worth redoing anything.