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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

Honestly, making fun of old platforms like the web (which isn't even that old) suggests that the writer is the kind of wide-eyed business huckster playing into Americans' cultural affinity for new tech, and folks like that are a huge chunk of the reason why we have so much technology churn today

Old, mature technology is a treasure. Not something to make fun of

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This is a rude and unkind way to refer another person in this conversation (the poster two comments up from you in the thread and the author of the letter in question). Reconsider your approach.

Web development absolutely epitomizes this same technology churn. Regardless if one personally sticks to older standards but its impossible to ignore the large section of commercial web applications that are just as much on the tech churn treadmill.

> just as much on the tech churn treadmill.

Really? I doubt you could run an app written for Android in 2010 (2.2 Froyo) today. But a website written in 2010 using HTML, Javascript, and CSS and no plugins will almost always work.

I use a shopping list app[1] that was last updated in January 2011 (so pretty close to 2010) and still works fine. The UI is huge and blurry, but it works.

[1] https://f-droid.org/app/caldwell.ben.trolly

Aintcha kinda makin' the opposition's point? That usage case is at a bare-minimum level of dead-simple and minimal-time-in-app usage. Any app with a more involved workflow would effectively be considered obsolete due to being so inferior.

I don't know, I wasn't necessarily making a point, just giving a counter-example. And this simple app is hardly inferior - I use it because I like it.

As a counter point, there are always some business oldsters who remain attached to their old technology stack, don't really contribute anything to moving innovation forward, and arrive 5 years after a tech has matured with wisecracks which are technology's equivalent of "If you wait long enough, everything reverts to the mean". Sure, but I think we already know that.

Besides, I am not sure how anyone can argue that the level of churn is bad, considering that it is usually proportional to the volume of new ideas and an eventual winner emerging (albeit not always in a meritocratic fashion).

I don't know if you meant to, but you just described Steve Jobs.

I've described a lot of technology businesspeople. At least Jobs had vision.

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