I agree with the general sentiment of your comment and I think there are several factors at play here.
* The human brain is not capable of evaluating and re-evaluating every possible option amongst the plethora of technical choices developers are faced with. This forces us to develop certain coarse grained mental heuristics (prejudices and biases) to navigate technology, and even if these broad generalizations are roughly true initially, we tend not to re-evaluate them over time. This leads to stale biases (e.g. some library/language was missing an API 10 years ago, and someone formed an immutable opinion on it).
* These broad generalizations lack nuance. I watched a talk recently by Dan Abramov where he calls these heuristics (I'm paraphrasing) a form of information compression [1]. That compression is lossy — it doesn't preserve the original context in which the heuristic was formed.
* There's also some insecurity at play here too. Developers want to believe that they've chosen The One True Solution, and harshly invalidating the alternatives is one way to reenforce that fantasy.
* And of course, social media has exacerbated this problem by rewarding inflammatory hot takes. You won't get nearly as many views/upvotes/likes for a sober take that says "technology X is well suited for this narrow use case" as you will for a hot take that says "why technology X failed", or "why everyone hates technology X".
I think a general lack of criticism also plays a part. When someone has decided that X is the best approach, they tend to point to blog articles that favour their point of view as "proof", while dismissing other point of views as "uninformed".
A typical example are all those "We rewrote our service from X to Y and got huge benefits" articles.
- They are ignoring the fact that the new version has the benefit of years of experience with the actual problem domain and can be optimized
- They also tend to use a different stack such as a more specialized database, async processing using message queues etc. that provides huge benefits.
Someone will always cherry pick some aspect of that article (language or choice of database) as proof that their point of view is correct, while ignoring the fact that they are not comparing an apple with an apple.
To get a real comparison they should have written a third system using their new architecture and the old langauge, but that would of course be hard to justify outside of academic research. The developers probably wouldn't do it anyway, because if the old language proved just as effective it would be harder to justify why they chose a new language. Resumé Driven Development is unfortunately a real thing.
> To get a real comparison they should have written a third system using their new architecture and the old langauge, but that would of course be hard to justify outside of academic research.
Good point. You need a control group to make sure you're measuring the thing you think you're measuring.
* The human brain is not capable of evaluating and re-evaluating every possible option amongst the plethora of technical choices developers are faced with. This forces us to develop certain coarse grained mental heuristics (prejudices and biases) to navigate technology, and even if these broad generalizations are roughly true initially, we tend not to re-evaluate them over time. This leads to stale biases (e.g. some library/language was missing an API 10 years ago, and someone formed an immutable opinion on it).
* These broad generalizations lack nuance. I watched a talk recently by Dan Abramov where he calls these heuristics (I'm paraphrasing) a form of information compression [1]. That compression is lossy — it doesn't preserve the original context in which the heuristic was formed.
* There's also some insecurity at play here too. Developers want to believe that they've chosen The One True Solution, and harshly invalidating the alternatives is one way to reenforce that fantasy.
* And of course, social media has exacerbated this problem by rewarding inflammatory hot takes. You won't get nearly as many views/upvotes/likes for a sober take that says "technology X is well suited for this narrow use case" as you will for a hot take that says "why technology X failed", or "why everyone hates technology X".
You might enjoy this link: https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17KCHwOwgms