Ethical Software by Alex Bunardzic

Chris Shiflett writes in his Ruby on Rails Fans post:

Ruby on Rails is a niche technology, and although all signs indicate that its popularity is growing rapidly, it’s a bit premature to be thinking that it will dethrone existing technologies.

The problem with the above statement is that it assumes that there are technologies which are not niche. But there really aren’t.

Even far-reaching technologies, such as web, are niche. Each technology has its niche, and there is no such thing as a general purpose technology.

Another misconception is that successful technologies tend to dethrone less successful ones. This is again connected to the erroneous belief that there are non-niche technologies.

But if we look around, we’ll see that no technology ever goes away. Even though we live in the age of supersonic traveling, there is still plenty of trains, even horse carriages going around. These technologies will never go away.

Same is with high-tech. Mainframes running COBOL programs are here to stay. They will never get replaced by Ruby on Rails based software.