Let me say it again – Software development is about being effective and efficient.
Browsing twitter and other social media I often see how technology is preferred just because is “sexy”. It is new and “cool”.
You have to remember that programming languages and platforms are just tools. If you need a hammer you should not use a screwdriver, no matter how new and fancy it is the screwdriver.
Some bad examples of software development
During my career, I have seen how projects fail because of the wrong tool usage. Real example – a very simple CRUD application but implemented with Event Sourcing and CQRS. Why? Because it was “cool”. Did the requirements need such an implementation? No. The customer just wanted several tables with related data. When the customer had asked for improvements and expansion of the system the development team decided to start from scratch with a new approach just because the current architecture was not cost-effective for the desired expansion.
Another great example. Back in the days when Silverlight (anybody remembers Silverlight?) came out a company whose tech lead I know personally, decided to adopt the technology for their new ERP System UI. It was a very risky call. The technology was new and it had not been tested intensively on the real market. Nobody knew back then that Silverlight would be discarded as an unwanted child several years later. But it was “cool”…
History knows many bad examples. The question is – do we learn from them?
In software development, everything is about a trade-off. You trade speed for availability, complexity for flexibility, etc. When the trade-off is not about quality attributes but your personal preferences and desires then you are going to have a problem.
Anytime you choose a course of action you should ask yourself “What I win? What I lose?”. If I choose the new fancy JS library will it be on the market next 5 years? If I have to process large amounts of textual data which is better Java or Python? Of course, answers may vary and that’s normal.
If you want to be cool, use the proper tools, and complete the project on time and budget. There is nothing cooler than that 😊.
