I think the 'top level choices we have are fine (ie. .NET, Java, Node, Ruby, PHP, Python etc.)

It's the detail choices - like which framework to use, what build tools, what test frameworks, what CLI tools, what deployment tools etc. - that's what's tearing up the industry right now. Going to any technical meeting this day is just an excercise in alphabet soup parsing.

The problem is that all these things don't seamlessly fit together. You choose one thing differently and things no longer work. It's a real problem and there are a million things you need to know. If you're building Web applications today and need to deploy them - it's more difficult than ever before especially if you use hosted solutions that require you to use some of those tools. All the major stacks are affected by that. JavaScript worst of all (Node and client frameworks), .NET (.NET Core, and full .NET) - and I hear it's the same with Ruby, Java and Python. This is not helping our industry right now, because essentially you end up with islands of knowledge that are difficult to manage by other people than those that put the solutions together in the first place...


+++ Rick ---

>>The problem we have today IMHO is that we have too many choices on how to do things and everybody thinks we should do things differently.
>I see that as an opportunity, not a problem.
>Those of us who chose Fox circa 1987 from the miriad alterntatives- actually, there were more then than there are now- made a satisfying and lucrative choice
>I asked myself then, as I ask myself now, "Ten years from now, how will this direction look to you and your clients?"
>During the mid 1980's I was convinced that THE answer would arrive and it did.
>I had my Ah Hah moment when I was evaluting mainframe applicatin the firions that started at $250K and someone showed me a DBASEII app that did all that the mainframe apps did and more, and cost $2500.
>Then I discovered that Fox was even better, and off I went,
>
>For desktop apps, .NET is surely THE answer but for web apps I haven't found that kind of certitude and probably won't for awhile.
>Right now, I'm using .NET/SQL Server and PHP/Mysql.
>Both are OK but neither gives a satisfactory answer to my question.
>People are spending tens of millions of dollars on mediocre web apps.
>That will change, as it always has, because the opportunity is huge.