The evolution of software development over the past decade has been very frustrating. Little of it seems to makes sense, even to those of us who are right in the middle of it. My theory is fairly straightforward:
The long-term popularity of any given tool for software development is proportional to how much labour arbitrage it enables.
The more effective it is at enabling labour arbitrage, the more funding and adoption it gets from management.
Consider how well Lotus Notes handles your form>…>messaging pipeline. Why aren’t we still using an evolution of that? There’s always a shiny new technology that promises to fix all of the problems of the previous ones.