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 can write a pretty good Java Applet. All technologies will fall by the wayside eventually, but this one had a very sharp rise and fall.

Answer 2

I'm incredibly close to the flame everyday by being an early MonoTouch adopter. I never know what's going to happen next with this framework. But to its credit, the Novell team is standing by with fire extinguishers just about 24/7 :)

Answer 3

Delphi.NET. Still have a tic when I hear that!

Answer 4

Not programming but still a newer technology blunder - I nearly lost a nipple to my first mini-ATX build, moral of that story is to never lean over a case while trying to forcefully close it when it gets jammed...

Answer 5

True Basic

In the mid-1980s we were looking for a development platform that would work on the various DOS implementations and not be as "bit-twiddling" a language as C was.

We found True Basic, advertised as having been created by the original creators of BASIC back in 1964. Here was a language that 'compiled' down to p-code. Not only would it run on DOS machines, it ran on GEM (Atari-ST) and Amiga boxes.

It had add-ons much like we were used to having with development environments on the VAX/VMS machines we used. Things like Forms packages, an "ISAM" add-on (before the days of callable databases on PCs), etc.

Unfortunately, the multi-platform abilities never sold the language enough. Heck, according to Wikipedia, there's a Mac OS version (though not OS X or Snow Leopard). I even found the 'current' TrueBasic page while writing this note.

Eventually Visual Basic 1.0 came out and all the BASIC programmer, like myself, checked it out since it had Microsoft's name on it. Now, of course, 10 versions later, we've been steered over to the .Net platform while TrueBasic sits at V5.5.

Answer 6

QBASIC never really took off. I spent years learning it too.

OK, to be fair it was my first language and a good way to learn. And it was later replaced by Visual Basic, then VB.NET. So it wasn't a complete waste of my time. ;)

Most of the time even if a language doesn't "take off" exactly, it's still a good learning experience that can be applied to something else.