yeah, that was rather curious. Similar to how XML died out. Not with a bang but with a whimper. Not that NoSQL or XML are completely gone today, just like PHP. But suddenly one day you recognize these topics are no longer appearing on HN or elsewhere. Then you realize you're getting old and... oh my god... we're actually stuck working in a fashion industry and nothing matters, life is meaningless, and all this is dumb dumb dumb.

When HN and other techies find a new hammer they end up beating that hammer against every problem they see. Right now it's SQLite. I love SQLite. But man. Can we quit talking about it for one fucking day already? This is probably how it felt to be an Erlang fan when Facebook bought WhatsApp. I remember the decades of Joe Armstrong talking about Erlang on Usenet and no one caring. It's just cargo cult with no thought behind it. WhatsApp was successful using X, so if we use X we must be successful. People have this perception that Python is new and modern despite being, relatively speaking, the same age as Perl. Erlang was cool long before WhatsApp. It's really quite old tech.