Distant Thunder: The ecosystems appears healthy or even growing just before collapse.

Disruption Threats: The ecosystem is vulnerable to becoming irrelevant because the platform is sustains is becoming irrelevant.

Insidious Pragmatism: The passion is forced out by pragmatists attaining critical mass, so it ceases to innovate and capture imagination.

New platforms can obsolete a language overnight. Java Applets, HTML, and JavaScript killed Visual Basic.

There's a certain person who culturally hates innovation. They might be a laggard in the "crossing the chasm" model. They often call themselves "pragmatists."

They are good for one reason and bad for two reasons.

Basically, death. Progress drops to zero and the ecosystem becomes a legacy platform.

There's no tolerance for risk such as breaking backwards compatibility. Microsoft has had one post-Windows hit, XBOX. The one that doesn't run Office or have "Windows" in its name.

Trite (and false!) definition: "Trading quality of result for lowering volatility, then scaling the output."

This is the pragmatic way. It's not just Java and its programmer hordes, it's also futzing with RVM and Bundler instead of rethinking Ruby :-)

Pragmatists are good because they bring the money. They get "results people can measure."

Which means, that quite often metrics like the number of companies hiring Ruby talent or the types of contracts available can slowly morph from tracking the ecosystem's health to tracking its penetration by pragmatists.

Development is going to move to tablets, and we don't have a good story here. Again, somebody needs to come up with a good story here.

These are all pragmatic issues, they look backwards.

programs are in constant motion, development is a process, not a project.

We need to talk this over.

Binding should be done much later than it is now. Code should have its own nicknames for things, it shouldn't know their global names.

Names are important for people to communicate, but not for programs.

It's the behaviour we care about.

We were playing in the fields and this boy said to me, "See that bird standing on the stump there? What's the name of it?"

I said, "I haven't got the slightest idea."

He said, "It’s a brown-throated thrush. Your father doesn't teach you much about science."

I smiled to myself, because my father had already taught me that [the name] doesn't tell me anything about the bird. He taught me "See that bird? It's a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it's called a halsenflugel, and in Chinese they call it a chung ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird--you only know something about people; what they call that bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way," and so forth. There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.

http://youtu.be/05WS0WN7zMQ
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html

We should write specs for the components we bind to, and refer to the spec versions, not the component versions.

Why not move on to the next hip thing?

Which means selling people faster horses.