Some people don't trust black boxes because they have been burned too many times in the past. I don't want to make this an age thing, but in my observation the people who are chomping at the bit to jump on the next big thing are generally those who haven't yet really suffered because of someone else's mistake.
Cryptography's got the right attitude. Don't use things that are proven to be broken, but at the same time don't trust anything that hasn't been under the harsh glare of professional scrutiny for a while.
I'm 34. I started teaching myself software development when I was seven. I have done PC assembly, C, C++, OpenGL, Win32, MFC, OCaml, .NET, PHP, Python, Twisted, AS3, JavaScript, WordPress, CoffeeScript and other types of programming. I have suffered because of mistakes in the underlying platform implementation in some cases, but in my experience more often I am suffering because of fundamental design limitations of the platform.
People move on to the next thing because they know it solves fundamental engineering problems built in to the platform they are on that are causing constant problems and they are tired of suffering through that. Such as manual memory management or traditional threading.
For example, back in my C/C++ days, I worked on a number of projects that were threaded and manually memory managed. No matter how genius the team members were we always spent a significant amount of time either guarding against those types of issues or diagnosing them, or working on Make scripts or other build-related distractions.
So that was one reason why I moved to C#/.NET many years ago. The advantage of being able to access source code in open source projects, cost benefit and lack of vendor lock in moved me away from that.
Or for example my main project right now is based on Etherpad which was originally written in Rhino which is a Java-based JavaScript. They saved a lot of lines/characters of code by doing it in JavaScript originally which was good software engineering since less code means fewer defects and JavaScript runs on both the browser and server which is also helpful. However, it was built on Java which has dated overly complicated APIs and Rhino is an inferior JavaScript engine. And we can't get it to stop freezing up/crashing at random times, which according to one of the former Etherpad team members is normal.
So we are following the lead of Etherpad and converting the application to be based on Etherpad Lite which is a running on Node.js which is another next big thing. There are no threads, so I know that can't cause any freezing. The V8 memory management and code generation is state of the art. The system will use an order of magnitude fewer resources than the old one. The asynchronous Node execution model and APIs are obviously superior to Java. At least its obvious to me.
>So we are following the lead of Etherpad and converting the application to be based on Etherpad Lite which is a running on Node.js which is another next big thing. There are no threads, so I know that can't cause any freezing. The V8 memory management and code generation is state of the art. The system will use an order of magnitude fewer resources than the old one. The asynchronous Node execution model and APIs are obviously superior to Java. At least its obvious to me.
All of those assumptions are broken, some more heavily than others...
Cryptography's got the right attitude. Don't use things that are proven to be broken, but at the same time don't trust anything that hasn't been under the harsh glare of professional scrutiny for a while.