Thursday, March 04, 2010

Cynicism is not always bad...

“The Paradoxical Success of Aspect-Oriented Programming” by Friedrich Steimann includes a fantastic quote and graphic from an IEEE editorial by James Bezdek in IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems.

Every new technology begins with naive euphoria—its inventor(s) are usually submersed in the ideas themselves; it is their immediate colleagues that experience most of the wild enthusiasm. Most technologies are overpromised, more often than not simply to generate funds to continue the work, for funding is an integral part of scientific development; without it, only the most imaginative and revolutionary ideas make it beyond the embryonic stage. Hype is a natural handmaiden to overpromise, and most technologies build rapidly to a peak of hype. Following this, there is almost always an overreaction to ideas that are not fully developed, and this inevitably leads to a crash of sorts, followed by a period of wallowing in the depths of cynicism. Many new technologies evolve to this point, and then fade away. The ones that survive do so because someone finds a good use (= true user benefit) for the basic ideas.

How true.....Without cynicism true potential of a technological innovation can not be discovered...

Note: I ended up on this while reading an
post from Dennis Forbes on his defence of SQL/RDBMS.