[throwawayie6]

I think a general lack of criticism also plays a part. When someone has decided that X is the best approach, they tend to point to blog articles that favour their point of view as "proof", while dismissing other point of views as "uninformed".

A typical example are all those "We rewrote our service from X to Y and got huge benefits" articles.

- They are ignoring the fact that the new version has the benefit of years of experience with the actual problem domain and can be optimized

- They also tend to use a different stack such as a more specialized database, async processing using message queues etc. that provides huge benefits.

Someone will always cherry pick some aspect of that article (language or choice of database) as proof that their point of view is correct, while ignoring the fact that they are not comparing an apple with an apple.

To get a real comparison they should have written a third system using their new architecture and the old langauge, but that would of course be hard to justify outside of academic research. The developers probably wouldn't do it anyway, because if the old language proved just as effective it would be harder to justify why they chose a new language. Resumé Driven Development is unfortunately a real thing.

[throwitaway1123]

> To get a real comparison they should have written a third system using their new architecture and the old langauge, but that would of course be hard to justify outside of academic research.

Good point. You need a control group to make sure you're measuring the thing you think you're measuring.