If I use APL and Lisp, does that count as spending innovation tokens? Is boring technology old, or is it widely used? Most people I know don't consider J, kdb+/q, Haskell, or OCaml boring, but they are all awesome industrial strength languages/technologies.
Boring is boring---i.e., no surprises. Whether it's been tested by a lot of other people, a lot of years, or even just a lot of your time. APL is not boring to me, but it might be to you.
I’ve found boring in this context to be a function of 3 things (in no particular order):
- Your experience using the tool in question to solve this problem or very similar ones
- Your teammates’ experience using the tool in question to solve this problem or very similar ones
- The world’s experience using the tool in question to solve this problem or very similar ones
The specific drivers of this tend to be a mix of problem-solving pattern matching ie “Hey, we know what the usual suspects are know when things are slow/crash”, and ecosystem robustness — what is the probability of you being the first to trip a bug in a dependency / has a library been used to solve 10000 problems or just 3 — It’s more likely that APIs have been sorted out, bugs have been closed, etc. or that your team knows the quirks.
As an example, OCaml might be a relatively boring choice for writing a theorem prover, but for something like a RDBMS-backed web application, things are a lot more “interesting” as you go off the map much sooner.
