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Endemic Technologies

There are at least three types of technologies.

The Main Sequence

Some live in three classical stages:

1. Origin and narrow circle of enthusiasts;

2. Growth and widespread use;

3. Moral obsolescence, legacy;

These include most of the mainstream Java, Kotlin, Go, Docker, Vagrant, mongo, postgres, VSCode, IDEA, etc.

Hype failures

There are stillborns. They born to die. We usually learn about them from happy threads on reddit and HN. It doesn't even make sense to list them, there are thousands of them.

Survivalists

And there are endemics. They exist to survive. Their adoption will never exceed 1%, but they have outlived and will outlive most of the mainstream products.

Emacs has seen the bodies of about a dozen popular IDEs float down the river and will bury as many more. The gopher and geminispace community will be arguing for several human generations about which browser is the best and unbloated. Fido nodes will be rewritten to rust.

These are strange creations of software evolution and geek ego similar to lichens or deep-sea shrimp. They exist on the crumbs of pure enthusiasm, inconspicuous and very fragile in appearance. But these are the very drops of the primordial soup that gave rise to all IT. From time to time one of the freaks gets a lucky mutation, and something like bitcoin shakes the world.

If tomorrow the bursting dot-com 2.0 bubble buries today's ecosystem under it, then guess who will emerge from the rubble?