RethinkDB Postmortem
I do find it truly sad how anti-intellectualism is pervading our industry and causing good products to die. Nowadays, a significant number of the hottest new technologies offer literally nothing of value beyond &quot;low learning curve&quot;. It&#x27;s my current belief that tech culture has lost nearly everything that once made us great.<p>Think about some examples.<p>MongoDB is nothing but the object databases of the 80&#x27;s, rebranded. It&#x27;s main selling point is &quot;you don&#x27;t need to learn SQL&quot;. Object databases failed and people at the time were willing to learn something new (SQL). Nowadays, who will do that?<p>Go&#x27;s entire selling point is &quot;faster than python, no need to learn anything new&quot;. In terms of language features it&#x27;s again living in the 80&#x27;s - Java got generics in 2004 and Java was way behind the times. In terms of speed it&#x27;s worse than Java and Rust, maybe comparable to Haskell.<p>And NodeJS is nothing but &quot;write server code, no need to learn a new language&quot;. Isomorphism simply didn&#x27;t work. People think Node is fast because it can do async, but Java has been able to do <i>threaded</i> async for 15 years.<p>I wonder how much the industry could advance if we could simply persuade every developer to learn Java Postgres.