in defense of bright, shiny objects
statement
We get warned a lot about going after what’s new, for the novelty of it. But new things don’t come from the ether, they come from people being unsatisfied with the current offerings. So, we know that the new thing is at least an attempt to move forward, whereas the old thing is just the old thing. You might be able to move forward with the old thing, but just because it’s the old thing doesn’t mean you can, anymore than it being the new thing means that it will be worse. There are a lot of old things worth keeping for a lot of reasons. I don’t need to defend those, status quo is self-defending. I would like to speak in favor of the shiny new thing and in favor of migrating to it.
article 1
Changing for the sake of change is not all bad. I know it sounds like an argument against change on its own, but change has some merit. I have had to change computers about ten times in my career. The last three or four times, it was not even a problem. When you have to do things over and over again, you find ways to make it easier in the future. You group things together in better ways, throw out things you don’t need, and so on. That is what happens if you have a mood of change in your coding. If you are writing it knowing you will change platforms, or file formats, or whatever, you will protect yourself from that work, make change easy. If resistence to change is successful, things get stagnet, you tie your code to the system it runs on more and more. Then, when there are really good reasons to switch, it sucks.
article 2
Fun matters when you are working. Learning new things is fun, it keeps you thinking about what you are doing and makes it more likely people who care about what they are doing will be happy to stay, or join.
article 3
The old stuff doesn’t stay the same anyway, so why cling to it. You have to upgrade versions for performance and security reasons, so think about switching items. If you are on a product that isn’t making those updates, it isn’t because they don’t have those problems, it’s because they’ve lost their momentum. You don’t want to be stuck paying a premium for help in an obsolete codebase, just because somebody didn’t want to keep up with new technologies.
the end
Try something new, or at least try not to shoot down somebody’s plan to try something new.