Your unspoken message reflects the widespread idea in the industry that a detailed knowledge of old things is incompatible with doing new and exciting things. I think this notion is naive and also contributes to ageism, and I hope our industry recovers from it in my lifetime.
People are allowed to make mistakes, tons of them, and the software industry is one of the best industries to make mistakes in. You get quality feedback almost instantly and can fail faster than anywhere else. No one is claiming that "detailed knowledge of old things" is on it's way out. We are engulfed in systems and code that are decades old. I don't see the point in nay-saying.
But we can meaningfully compare and contrast newer database technologies as well. I think it's pretty clear that Mongo is the MySQL of NoSQL, and I do mean that in the most pejorative way imaginable. Architecture decisions like "let the kernel do all the swapping" decision, a casual approach to durability, the very mindset that leads to inclusion of SSL without certificate validation... ick.
They'll gradually polish their stuff up so that it's quasi-usable and maybe make lots of money, and good for their pocketbooks, but there are plenty of alternative data stores out there which have characteristics which render them more suitable for storing data for most if not all projects.
Failing fast is nice, but a more measured approach might result in less of it. When it comes to storage and email, people are surprisingly unwelcoming of failure at any speed. If a little study can avert a few catastrophes it's worth it. I think ours is probably the only industry that would question the wisdom of study.
By positioning history as in conflict with raw experimentation, naive excitement and all the rest, I think you're engraving the line in the false dichotomy. Is a week or two of research sans coding really such a high price to pay? Personally, I find there are a lot of really inspiring ideas in old stuff, ideas that strike me as newer and more exciting than "embed Javascript in X."
Are young developers' egos really so fragile they can't weather having someone with experience say "fsync should be on by default"? Is cracking open the source code to BerkDB really such a deflationary moment that it threatens our industry's progress? I, personally, think they can handle it.
This is discussion worthy, your original comment is just smug.
Someone else has probably already solved this problem 30 years ago, and they solved it in O(n) time.
However, that's never a bad thing, or it shouldn't be.
I think an unwillingness to look backwards is a sign of an unhealthy level of pride, and I'll freely admit that it's something I struggle with. However, I believe many (most!) developers would also benefit from trying to get past one's ego.
I know my clients won't tolerate "tons" of mistakes. Not even a few. In fact I am usually hired because the person they just let go made one too many mistakes with important data.
The main difference in startups isn't that they don't build software the "professional way" and thus make avoidable mistakes. Instead, the difference is that startups recognize that the mistakes are inevitable, so may as well embrace them and build a process / culture around prototyping and continual refinement toward actual business value.
Pie-in-the-sky posturing about The One Right Way is nice, and especially nice when your BigCo is footing the bill, but when you operate under real constraints (e.g. economical) prototyping speed and simplicity can outweigh all the other factors.
All that said, I still think MongoDB full-text search was a bad idea -- only because their implementation is pretty naive and this corner is satisfied nicely in F/OSS by a number of other indexes like Solr, ElasticSearch, Sphinx, etc.
Citation needed.
This "continuing in the face of nay-sayers" meme comes from old wives tales of "courageous inventors" that "went against the tide" etc.
In the general history of science and technology, those wasn't that many or important. They just make for a good media story.
The other side is more clear cut: incrementally building and learning from each field's history has been paramount.
Not to mention that you didn't address the (wrong? right? I dunno) extreme the parent said: that Mongo is mostly similar to the Pick database of yore. Is it? Can anybody shed more light?
>If only the whole world had enough insight to just stop before they tried to do something awesome.
MongoDB is fairly decent for what it does (it used to be much worse pre 2.0). But awesome? Really?