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This is a man (Mr. Toffler, not abmv) who clearly does not need to accomplish anything. For any progress to be made, man puts effort into defeating chaos, decrease entropy, order the world. By constantly changing frameworks and the insanity of current web development, I see neither order nor a win against the inevitableness of software rot.
Example: Ruby on Rails - I know many shops who made huge investments, but since technology has "moved on", they now have technical debt which no one wants to work on now that it's not the latest and greatest.
Sure, I'm okay with coming up with better mousetraps. So, abmv, are you suggesting investing on constantly learning the latest thing (get over it)? With the perpetual rolling out of framework after framework, things have gotten so crazy that we've circled back to "anyone can be a developer" the new phrase is low code environment. Another buzzword failure in the making.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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So, abmv, are you suggesting investing on constantly learning the latest thing (get over it)? ...well you need to know the fundamentals.... its subjective in software development...it depends on the job...also the new generation of coders will have "bright new ideas".....new ways to do things....embrace the change or perish..
Caveat Emptor.
"Progress doesn't come from early risers – progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things." Lazarus Long
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abmv - no argument from me about learning new things. My only point is there are new things and the current flood of this and that frameworks to the point of insanity.
ymmv
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Be honest, how long does it take to learn a framework nowadays?
In the most extreme case, a week.
In the vast majority of cases, a day or two.
As an example, let's look at Vue.
Why would anyone use Vue?
--> It contains data-binding boilerplate code, so you don't need to update every component manually when data changes.
How do you learn it?
--> You follow a 5 minute tutorial on their website.
How do you master it?
--> You take an hour to look at all of the user-reported issues on github and you avoid the parts that don't work.
**The More You Know**
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I would work on COBOL or FORTRAN systems in my semi-retirement, but never an old, slow framework having lots of better competitors.
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My most valuable skill: I can unlearn and relearn anything.
Courtesy of my mother's genes and her terrible long-term recall. 
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I believe one cannot experience change unless their is a certain degree of planned obsolescence. If that was not the case then we would all still be cave people, if that.
In technical terms, we would all still be using punch cards, I believe, if it were not for planned obsolescence.
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You can't possibly be serious.  Asserting that chaos is planned seems like a direct contradiction, an oxymoron to me.
I'd like a pithy signature here but I just can't think of one.
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Slacker007 wrote: In technical terms, we would all still be using punch cards, I believe, if it were not for planned obsolescence.
Nope. The concept of punch cards was invented in the 1700's to control looms, and "modern" punch cards were used well over a century ago for tabulating the 1890 US census.
Punch cards were replaced as a mechanism for data input, output, and storage because technological advances enabled the creation of better mechanisms. There was no planned obsolescence - it simply was progress.
The current mess that Slow Eddie pointed out is far from being progress. If anything, it's numerous backwards steps.
Part of the problem is due to a mass of folks believing they can do it better, so many make their own version of "X". Add to that global communications and talking heads, struggling for relevancy, promoting obscure technologies to make themselves sound useful. Add rabid fanbois and we get the current mess of numerous languages and frameworks that have no future planning and often no backwards compatibility.
Let's look at C# -- 90% of each of the last 10 DotNet framework updates were unneeded "features". Compacting the code so people can type less characters at the expense of readability is worse than useless, as it takes those supporting the code more time to figure out what it's doing. One of my co-workers spent 2 hours figuring out what a function HE wrote 6 months before was actually doing.
Microsoft is churning out updates to keep C# in the news and make it seem relevant.
Keep Hanlon's Razor in mind: Never Attribute to Malice That Which Can be Adequately Explained By Stupidity.
Planned obsolescence? While there is probably some, IMO it gives IT vendors far too much credit, as most appear to have a complete lack of vision beyond tomorrow's sales goal.
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Well said!
I always look at the new language features being released in upcoming Visual Studio upgrades. In recent years, I haven't seen a single one I would have used for fear of making my own development not only look like hieroglyphics but something I cannot understand if I leave the code for any length of time.
and even though the relatively new List<of> collection is inherently, internally superior to an ArrayList, I still don't even use it now since the data I store in my Arraylists is so minimal as to not affect performance.
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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We would be using abacus, if there were no lazy people. Since there are lazy people, someone came up with a way to stop using punch cards, not because someone planned to make them obsolescent.
Planned obsolescence is actually a force that is working against progress. It wastes resources on things, that are cuter and shorter lived, than the ones replaced instead of making them more functional and longer lasting (therefore redirecting efforts and resources from making cheap appliances to making say interplanetary spaceships).
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I stopped trying to keep up years ago. DotNet core put the last nail in the coffin, though.
Before that was the seemingly endless parade of javascript frameworks. No thanks.
I'm retiring in two years, so I don't give a shit anymore.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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I'll be 72 in less than a month. Retirement is not in my future, however. I'll work until I drop dead over my keyboard. Two reasons I can't quit. First, I need the money. Second I'd just lay on the couch  , and vegitate, while my wife aggravated the snot out of me.
"Too old to rock and Roll, too young to die." - Ian Anderson (Jethrol Tull)
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could not have said it better myself, but you've got ten years on me 
I finally have a hoard of children out of the house, although I do get a few leakers. I am now trying to repair all of the damage and do things for me and my dear wife.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Hate to burst your bubble, but my 45 year old daughter just moved back in with us, "to save money for a down payment on a house of her own". My wife defends her like a mother bear defending her cub.
Remember, your son is your son until he takes a wife. Your daughter's your daughter, the rest of your life!
"Old man take a look at my life" -- Neil Young
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I blame most of this on the open source "revolution" - anyone can create a framework and the lemmings go running off the cliff to embrace it and if you don't know it you're suddenly in the "out" crowd. It's such BS.
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On the web, JavaScript needs to die and browser based work needs a compilation step, and an actual debugger.
Meanwhile, transpiling, polyfilling, binding-frameworks, browser extensions for debugging.. all spring up to extend the lifespan of JavaScript, because JavaScript is still the king of the hill.
But, ever since WASM got into the evergreen browsers, there has opened up an alternative path, and now a bunch of frameworks are trying to take the hill and kill the king.
On the general UI front, people are trying to streamline UI workflows, so components actually work across platforms.
Which is, ironically, something we almost solved 3x over, but because big corporations hate each other they keep sabotaging every attempt at unifying the UI stack.
As a result, lot's of small initiatives spring up everywhere, which either die out over time, or get bought up and die out over time.
On the scientific front, Julia has created a new programming paradigm, and it seems like those ideas still need to re-invent themselves a couple of times.
On the low-level front, thread-safety is all the hype nowadays, because concurrent threads are a pain in C++, mostly because you need a lot of fault-free boilerplate code.
And after writing state-machine after state-machine to manage your threads, you kinda get tired of going through all that for nothing.
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Planned Obsolescence applies to everything that is done for the making of money!
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Just need better shoes...
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you're not wrong; things are changing stupid fast, and I'm not exactly seeing the benefit of it.
I feel that frameworks get updated (too quickly) to try to stay ahead of all the other competition to keep their market share, but at the cost of developers getting burned out.
New languages are fun, when you have enough time to play with them and fully understand the concepts that that new language offers and how it can be best used. When you get bombarded with "here's 6 languages you need to know this year" articles, it's pure BS. You might have the time to take a quick course on all 6, but you won't really know them or be able to put them to good practice.
When I got started professionally, Java was brand new, classic VB was the go to for desktop, C++ was for the hard core crowd, and C was the old friend. With C you could memorize most of the standard libraries and a few purchased ones, and work happily all day occasionally checking a reference book. There were other languages out there, but pretty fringe and would only show up in magazines once in a while.
Today, when jumping through a few languages to just get the daily work done, I find that a good portion of the day is just spent looking things up online, for what framework -> version -> feature you are trying to use, or the weird compiler/runtime error that's breaking everything, or what was all the options you can put in this type of configuration file? The list goes on.
In the older days you could know almost everything about your environment and language of choice and be able to use the leftover brain power to get creative to work around the short comings of that language. Now you have to know at least 10x the amount of information to just get started, and you will never have the time to truly dig deep in to a language.
Sorry for the rant, feeling my age this morning.
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Matt McGuire wrote: When you get bombarded with "here's 6 languages you need to know this year" articles, it's pure BS.
I agree.
As a young developer in the consulting/contracting market in the late 80's/early 90's, I got shoved into project after project, learning new technologies several times each year. It was fun and exciting! I rode that bleeding edge!
After 15 years of professional work, I had a huge breadth of experience but relatively little depth with the exception of C, SQL, and VB 4/5/6. And I was exhausted by the churn. I've seen tool after tool rise and fall, sometimes within just a couple of years. Sure, I learned new stuff faster than most, but learning something only to drop it for the next one got very old.
Now? My decision to learn a new language depends on market share and the local availability of jobs using that skillset. If I don't see a long-term use for a skillset, I pass on it. I don't have the enthusiasm I had and gained the wisdom to focus on what will benefit me in the long run. And my employer in the short term.
I read the "6 new languages to learn!" articles, then check the local jobs. Unless a language is trending, I ignore it. I'm ok with letting others ride that bleeding edge ...
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Well If I ever have to develop for web, at least it looks like typescript corrects most of the mistakes of ecmascript (javascript) but best of all, we have webassembly and you'd hardly have to leave the holy ASM/C/C++ trinity to code seriously for the web.
Otherwise there's nothing new under the sun. Young people are anxious for C++ 20 but I've been coding in version '94 (and a bit of the one after that) since always and I mix a lot of C into it (mind you I write them in .c files, not .cpp)
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I don't think it is planned anything. It's more like "framework baseball." Every author wants a turn at bat. 3/4 of the time they strike out. Sometimes they get a hit. More rarely a home run. You only see the hits.
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Well, the real joke is that in the end, it is all assembly or turned into machine code.
What I don't like is that in a lot of cases, most of the "new, cool kid things" are created by people that don't want to learn how to use the existing tools that actually work far better on the long term. Example? People that think LINQ is freaking awesome and refuse to learn SQL. Someone showed me LINQ and I just chuckled. (Keep in mind that I am a corporate internal apps and DB developer; full stack)
C and the primary C variants have been around for a VERY long time and deserve to keep on keeping on. Approaches like that taken with Java or Python are interesting and do have some degree of place but I stand by my position that most of these trendy things over the last 20 years are from people that just don't want to learn something or can't so they concoct something that does what was already amply doable in existing languages.
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