The tendency I was thinking of isn't chiefly about chasing the new shiny thing (Magpie programming) or mindlessly including needless libraries (Cargo Cult programming).
The thing I'm thinking of is when someone points out a shortcoming of a particular way of doing things. Like, "If you use a relational database, it might go down if you get 50 million writes at once."
All techniques have trade-offs. So it's no surprise that some established way of doing things has one. The criticism is valid. The thing will fail in that situation. The problem is that the alternative presented by the blogger has more problems than the first. It would be useful in a rare kind of job. But that's not made clear, or the reader can't see past the stain that was shown on the old way of doing things, or the reader can't get past how cool it is that there's a database that can handle 50 million simultaneous writes, or the mere novelty is intoxicating (so there is some overlap with Magpie programming).
This new way doesn't have the first one's shortcoming, but it is literally 10 or 100 times as much work to set up, is missing certain important features that the original solution had, and solves a problem that the reader will never have.
The tendency I was thinking of isn't chiefly about chasing the new shiny thing (Magpie programming) or mindlessly including needless libraries (Cargo Cult programming).
The thing I'm thinking of is when someone points out a shortcoming of a particular way of doing things. Like, "If you use a relational database, it might go down if you get 50 million writes at once."
All techniques have trade-offs. So it's no surprise that some established way of doing things has one. The criticism is valid. The thing will fail in that situation. The problem is that the alternative presented by the blogger has more problems than the first. It would be useful in a rare kind of job. But that's not made clear, or the reader can't see past the stain that was shown on the old way of doing things, or the reader can't get past how cool it is that there's a database that can handle 50 million simultaneous writes, or the mere novelty is intoxicating (so there is some overlap with Magpie programming).
This new way doesn't have the first one's shortcoming, but it is literally 10 or 100 times as much work to set up, is missing certain important features that the original solution had, and solves a problem that the reader will never have.