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Comment by thoman23 | Hacker News Reader

Does this mean if I wait long enough, I won't ever need to figure out what exactly Docker is?

That's the case with most technologies.

I managed to skip the whole Angular/Mongo hype, and now that I'm actually getting back into frontend development, it's all about React. Can't say I missed it.

I remember telling my boss at my very first job "Yeah, I want to learn MFC and COM". His response was "Why? By the time you're out of college, everything will be .NET." It turned out he had underestimated: by the time I graduated from college, MFC & COM had been replaced by .NET, which had been replaced by webapps running under J2EE, which were just about to be replaced by Rails & Django.

Actually, J2EE (December 12, 1999, if the Great Wiki is to believed) predates .NET (February 13, 2002, same source).

.NET and J2EE (or C# and Java) never really replaced each other--at best, .NET was MS's attempt to upgrade the MFC/COM stuff to the Java VM world after J++ fell apart. They're more or less the same model, one's just the Windows Server flavor while the other is the Linux/Unix flavor.

The hype cycle was later, though. Microsoft was the dominant tech company in the late 90s, and they liked to pre-announce software, and so everyone knew by 2000 or so that .NET was coming and was going to be the next big thing. In 2000 e-commerce was all the rage, but after the consumer Internet melt-down in 2001, a lot of the effort shifted to enterprise, which was where J2EE was marketed.

I'd say peak J2EE was 2002-2003 - it continued to be a factor up through 2007 or so, and probably still is now but the hype has long since passed it by. .NET had a peak hype cycle around 2000, when it was announced, and also continues to have many satisfied users today but ceased to gain major mindshare right around when Google started ascending in 2004-2005.

How do you stand on VanillaJS vs React these days? I remember some posts from you recommending that path.

I still believe every JS developers should know VanillaJS well. Without those fundamentals, you lack the ability to understand what the framework is doing for you.

React is a nice piece of software, I'm glad to see it introduce FRP to a mainstream audience, and it fixes certain problems around componentization that you will run into if you try to build a big-enough app in vanilla JS. I've been tempted to use it for a couple startup ideas, but then I remember that no app is "big enough" until it has actual users, and getting them is the hard part. So I remain largely agnostic about its usefulness for startups, while believing that it can be quite useful for more established teams.

Sure. With the true AI around the horizon if you wait long enough you won't have to figure anything - it will do it for you.

I wonder when AIs will start outsourcing work to humans.

AI is smart enough to not do that.

s/Mechanical Turk/Mechanical Human/

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