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Comment by rogual | Hacker News Reader

Why are tech people always "embracing" things?

We embrace a lot of things but we particularly enjoy embracing evolutionary shifts, sea changes and modern workflows.

The call to embrace a new thing often comes from the people who made the thing. Embrace Doppler. It's not a complicated new dependency to think about. It just wants a hug.

Sometimes the request for embracement comes from the community. Embrace Rust. Embrace us. Group hug.

It's difficult to say you don't want to embrace something. It's not like saying you don't want to use it. Not wanting to use it is a dispassionate technical decision. Not wanting to embrace it, though; that's very cold of you. Were you not hugged as a child? Why won't you join the embrace?

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Embracing may be a buzzword but it's different from "using". It has the connotation that you don't merely try the thing, you try to fully adhere to its design, follow its ideologies, etc.

Because a significant amount of people are neophiles. The need New stuff. The long for things that pierce the dull known. That are slightly risky. And that promise klout once the neophile embraces it to then talk about it and gain status as someone knowing new stuff.

These are the embracers. The first movers. The ones talking the thing up. Pushed by clever marketing the are the voices that make us laggards already having heard the terms and 'code words' so many times, that once it targets the general audience we already by virtue of repetition feel it being around long enough to be trusted. We feel it is people like us use things like these and don't 'fesr' the new anymore. So it crosses the chasm.

I think many people in tech are quite ideological about their tooling, with some people being almost sacred about their tooling convictions. I imagine that's why we get a lot of this emotional veneer in tooling discussions from.

Sometimes it makes sense, FP versus OOP for example are really core differences in beliefs about what is the "right" way to write software. But then you get the same language and being used for asinine tooling like, which CSS pre-processor is best, or articles like "React Considered Harmful".

“You cannot hug a child with nuclear arms!”

because people are suckers for the new thing, but new does not always mean improved.

Because we all just want hugs.

What? Just me?

Tech people should embrace rejection.

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