Technological Deconstructionism

[markw-FJ05HQ0HCKaWd6l5hS35sQ at public.gmane.org (Mark Woodward)]

On 12/07/2010 11:43 AM, Matt Shields wrote:
>
> Nor do I.  I'm not against NoSQL, but I've seen a lot of people who 
> are in charge of projects I have direct say in jump on the latest 
> technologies (not just databases) without understanding what happens 
> underneath just because they want to work with something new and cool. 
>  I'm not a dba, I'm a sysadmin, but understanding databases has helped 
> me immensely when it comes to dealing with people who want to try out 
> every cool toy that comes along.  And that goes for all the latest 
> technologies, not just new database types.
>
> I've also noticed part of this trend is contributed by developers now 
> trying to become their own sysadmin because they can now 
> auto-provision their own wants with services like Amazon Cloud.  They 
> then show this cool new toy they have to upper management, who likes 
> it.  Then when they deploy it, it crashes and burns because they 
> haven't thought through the whole environment and how it will be 
> impacted by actual load.  It used to be that they would work with 
> operations departments to help draw up requirements, now they're going 
> around us.
>

A couple years back (I was 45) I was talking to a techie who was in his 
early 60s and maybe we coined a term, or maybe other people use it, I 
don't know. Anyway, we battle "Technological Deconstructionism" on a 
constant basis. This trend disregards the successes and structures 
generated by  previous waves of technologists. Thus we never get to 
build, for very long, on the foundations built before us. We are forever 
re-inventing the wheel merely because the previous incarnation of the 
wheel was "old" or built with a system which is no longer fashionable.

I sometimes think of an analogy between programming languages and spoken 
languages. Imagine what would have happened to literature if every 10 
years or so guys would say things like, "English isn't expressive 
enough, I'm going to create my own new language!" Thus every 
sub-generation of people speaks and reads a different language. We'd be 
speaking some millionth variation of "ug."