Similarly on Flux: I implemented an immutable store where only incoming messages change state and changes are distributed to widgets in 2005.
Around the same time we started using feature flags in our application.
We also did CI around 2000. Didn't call it that of course.
Never did it myself but heard of TDD long before it became a thing. Again under a different name.
Erlang. Superior technology that forms the heart of new kid on the block Elixir. Built long before the Bay Area CS grads re-invented ageism and claimed young people to 'be just smarter'.
Sure some things are new, but there's just no respect for experience any more.
It's not all that innovative, it's just very easy to use, and very well put together.
IMHO If go were invented by anybody other than Google it wouldn't have enjoyed anywhere near the success that it did.
I'm usually extra suspicious of "hot" open source technologies with a marketing budget and/or tech behemoth behind them. It's not that they can't be fundamental steps ahead it's that the marketing can end up causing undeserved popularity.
And the point of Go is that it isn't trying to be "fundamental steps ahead". If anything, Go is an opinionated statement that programming was better in 1992 than it is today, so let's just fix the annoying shit from 1992 and pretend the word "enterprise" had continued to just mean the ship from Star Trek.
I think it's not just Google, but the cult of Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, etc. I appreciate their work on so many things, so I don't mean any ill-will. I was a user of ACME editor and Plan9, but just like those projects, Go has so many polish issues in critical areas. The package management alone is ridiculous. The common theme in all these projects is for every good idea, there is an order of magnitude more critical mistakes or divisive ideas that cripple the end result in some way.
Go is alright, but it's not really that interesting to me or a monumental leap. There are a few ideas that others could cherry-pick and put into much better designed languages to take it all a step further in my opinion.
I'm a 50+ developer who has increasingly felt that "life is too short" to spend all my time trying to keep on the latest fads.
That being said, I have found myself doing more "fun" programming in Go lately, precisely because, as you said, they hit the mark with how simple and clean the language is, with little of the baggage that comes along with a lot of languages and frameworks (I'm looking at you Rails and React) today.
clean syntax standard libraries write once, run anyone
Many people focus on JSX or virtual DOM and muse about how that just duplicates the browser-- what's the point? But that isn't the point. It's componentization and encapsulation for large teams at scale, and for Facebook it works, it makes them more successful at pulling together disparate modules on a single page than their competitors, so there is some meat to this $NEWSHINY.
Now, if the browser itself had been properly designed years ago to be componentized and encapsulated, we'd have those features without inventing a new DOM or creating a new tagging language or isolating CSS. There is a web components standard that offers much of the same thing... It came out around the same time as React, but still isn't widely used outside of Google Polymer. Truth is these were developed in parallel before they knew of each other.
Anyway, React makes a lot more sense if you think of it as rewritting the browser from outside the browser. In the old days the stack that would have been hard to impossible-- you would have simply started your own browser. And people would have shamed you for not following existing standards, so you would have petitioned the W3C or served on committees to bring your real-world cases for years, being mostly ignored.
Now, devs have the ability to change the browser quickly and find things that work (and also create chaos and suffering).
Meh. Kids. ;)
Every framework is about componentization and encapsulation.
You could take React out of your post and replace it with any framework name in the last 40 years and it would have made 'sense' at the time.
Like the author said, right now a veteran looks at react and sees the mistakes of 15 years ago when we mixed code and presentation.
An insult to our Master, Satan would never create something so awful :P
But that is only for the 'abstractions' they implement; the details are another thing.
I feel the only thing that really changed is that now big companies with PR / marketing departments are on the case while before it was more a geek thing. There is nothing fundamentally different in new frameworks (heck, most are them are just rehashes of others that are many years old with very small improvements), but suddenly the echo chamber makes it out to be vital to your career.
Like React. It's nice but come on... Every frontend programmer I know is fretting that they are not into it enough because you will die or something if you are not. That seems good marketing by Facebook to get such a solid drive behind it so quickly. But it's not needed for anything; you can still just use what you used before and often faster/better (because you are good at what you did for many years right?) and you don't have to bother with learning the latest thing all the time, while, with React, because you are drinking the cool aid, you have to update/refactor/redo stuff often because of changing libraries and new insights. It would make you stressed if think you feel you have to keep up with all of that.
Also, some tools seem to have just been made to look smart. Really, something like Webpack doesn't have to be that obfuscated. It really looks like it has been made like that just to say; 'ah, you just do not get it'. I see people (20somethings included) really sweating in their keyboard when trying to figure out more than the basics of that thing; so why are people using it? Why is it actually popular?