I love how people watching me talk and mentioning my age or calling me a millennial straight up assume I wasn’t around when PHP, ASP .NET, or even XSLT were hype. I’m not deeply familiar with them because I mostly did desktop but I started early so I’ve seen a few things. 🙂
Here’s a challenge. When I want to tweet “X is just like Y back in the olden days” I try adding “but...” and figure out what the difference is. If I thought of a past analogy after one minute of thinking, clearly I’m not the first one to think this, and there might be more to it.
It’s easy to see the past references. They stand out, and there’s a limited number of variables to play with in the design. Some things will repeat. It’s harder to notice the new twist. Which can turn a past weakness into strength or solve a limitation.
Like, ASP .NET WebForms wasn’t good, but do you know *why* it wasn’t good? If your takeaway is that XML is bad or that any technology spanning both the server and the client is bad, you might want to jog your memory and dig for nuance.
There’s also an interesting area of “almost good” ideas. Where something is actually pretty good but some other flaw caused it to work poorly. People only remember it in conjunction with the flaw and have a knee-jerk reaction with a different take on the same thing.
Finally, uh, you don’t have to be born in a certain time or have a computer at a certain age, to contribute to the discussion. If you’re working on something new it would be a jerk move from me to assume you haven’t spent some time learning about prior art. Extend that courtesy.
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