Have you ever burned your hands by some new and immature technology?

Question

I often hear people saying you shouldn\'t rush into adopting new technologies until they have become stable, tried and tested. There is even a joke on how it takes 3 versions to

Answer 1

I could count many of them. The one that still hurts when I think about it is WLPI (an old BEA workflow product). Never worked out and the vendor abandoned it. Sigh ...

Anyway, I would say keeping up with the latest (knowing what is there, considering it) is very worthwhile, but only live on the cutting edge if:

1. You are prepared to get cut and bleed (money/time/resources)
2. It provides an important strategic advantage/competitiveness.

A good example for this is AJAX. It is now mature enough that every new website should be doing it unless they have a compelling reason not to, but when it was first becoming possible, a website built on it would have been very expensive compared to the traditional alternative.

Some websites need the latest look and feel to stay competitive, even to the point where the features of the site themselves are secondary and they needed to be AJAX early adapters. Others do not. Know who which one you are and act accordingly.

Answer 2

Yes. I'm a Lisp programmer: everything looks new and immature to me. :-)

Answer 3

For me Delphi's IntraWeb was it.

Answer 4

Hell yes

I'm currently feeling the pain of being an early adopter of Fortran 2003 :-)

Mark

Answer 5

This addresses your discussion more than your question. I think you are assuming that the cost benefit of adopting new technologies is a given. For a very large corporation, changing technologies can cost hundreds of millions of dollars. If the cost benefit is not there then the hundreds of millions can be saved. Most companies use technology to make something else and can not afford to consume new technology simply because it exists. When the cost benefit is there, then it makes sense to do so.

Answer 6

Scala.

It looks great on paper, so I wrote a project with it while making sure to keep my Scala version up-to-date. The version number (2.7.x) and its years in development made me feel relatively secure doing that.

Well, I made a mistake. The problem? Serious lack of documentation and code samples, as well as ever-changing class library (twice during my work, previously-working code started getting "deprecated" warnings... and I'm talking over the span of a few months and similar version numbers).

I can't say I lost much (this was a private project) but I will not touch Scala in the near future. I still think it's a very nice, promising language, though.