>>>The human body and its ills has traditionally not been the fast moving target that tech has been.
>
>Wow. OK, consider the human genome: vendors can't just declare something that suits them and push it on the market, it has to be validated *before* anybody gives it any credence, after which its significance truly can be game changing. The point is that vendors cannot come up with some change, get a fanboi Mexican Wave going and then start deprecating the status quo to provoke change. That's regarded as experimentation on patients and practitioners. Practitioners decide what they will use and a vendor who tries to force change will run straight into the FDA, JCAHO and all sorts of others established precisely to prevent self-serving vendor activity, or future mistakes like Thalidomide. The link to customer benefit is direct, measurable and reproducible with the vendors needing to convince practitioners and investigators rather than laying down the law. Dragan likes to assert collusion between doctors and vendors, but there's always a few in every industry.

I must have expressed that badly. I was saying the human body and the things that go wrong with it (not the cures and treatments) have probably changed less in the last 2000 years than the IT platform has changed in the last 10. That is certainly one of the reasons medical truths and solutions once proven should continue to work unless there is some kind of mutation of the patient population - or of the disease itself (one thinks of drug resistence)


>
>>>Our field has a lot of instances where needs changed but some developers kept insisting this did not require new approaches to handle those needs. If your tool was the best thing anyone had seen for writing desktop datacentric LAN apps with limited UI expectations then you should be able to continue to use that tool to write asynchronous responsive UI apps against data stores exposed on the web and do all the tests etc that are now considered best practice. And I think that mindset caused a lot of folks to waste a lot of time trying to ignore the future (MS and the internet) or try to solve this years problem with the tools of their salad days.
>
>There's nothing intrinsically wrong with old. Penicillin is one of the oldest (and cheapest) antibiotics out there but if it does the job, it gets used. I could also point to Digitalis for heart conditions whose first recorded use was in 1785 and which has been used in tablet form for >100 years. In 2013, patients who don't do well on newer fancier drugs often end up on Digoxin. I agree that in IT, Digoxin would be regarded as a profoundly obsolete useless option that could not possibly still be any good compared to something more interesting invented yesterday without proof at 20 times the price. Medical practitioners also like cool new stuff but patient welfare dictates that if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
>

I don't claim there is anything wrong with old. I play an acoustic piano and abhor electrified music for the most part. My taste in art runs more to art nouveau and pre-Raphaelites than most of what has been chic since WW II and I think someone should have strangled Le Corbusier in his nest. My brain and body are old. (admittedly I am increasingly having fun with the former and becoming dissatisfied with the latter.)

Perhaps I'm misunderstand what changes in the IT landscape you find as example of eggregious change causing deterioration of quality. I am sure we would agree on a lot of them or least in use cases of their application.

Since you mention the keynote at SW Fox which I didn't hear I am at a disadvantage as to the context but have heard enough keynote speeches to guess that the point in part was at least to make the attendees feel a little better about devoting a lot of time to a technology that could not exactly be called cutting edge.

>>>I had no agenda asking what kind of development you were doing or supervising personally other than genuine curiousity. My impression had been you were rather convinced cross platform approaches that allowed for responsidve UI and diverse backends were not just a fad,
>
>That's projection dude. But it's simply not about me: my anecdote is useless because it's about as atypical as it gets.

okay, you don't want to say what you do in IT so your personal choices are not subject to criticism (which would have to be by someone else, as I have enough respect for you to assume that whatever it is you are doing is well-considered and successful)

>
>>>Again, I am only stating my personal preference for rapid change and constant evolution of ideas. I get bored easily and probably feel at a competitive disadvantage when the race goes to the dilligent over dilletante. <s>
>
>Your words, Charles. The customer base has been prepared to pay high prices for this sort of recreation, but it won't be forever. FWIW I meet all sorts of interesting people as I wander around: last week I met an investor dude doing very advanced speech and banking IT work. He told me the trend amongst the "smart" players is not to employ US developers. Too expensive and self-referential (his words) compared to hard workers in Romania. Don't blame the messenger.

And my god the Romanians are welcome to it.

But I am not defending trends or the massive geological shifts of corporate decision makers. I find ossification boring and never was interested in working in Big IT. I got into this in Silicon Valley in the 70s when it was fun and we didn't take it all that seriously.

I'm only saying that if IT ever becomes as exciting as accountancy, blacksmithing or bricklaying I will find something else to do with my time. I got into this because of the pace of change and I would not hesistate to get out for the same reasons. So far I don't see that as a threat.