According to the stereotypes, men fear committing to personal relationships. I find that hard to relate to, but I can relate to fear of technological commitment. I don’t want to take the time to learn something well that’s going to go away in a year. I want to pick the best tool for the job, but sometimes I’ve invested too much time in evaluation.
I recently listened to panel discussion on whether software development has become too complex, one of the major complaints was the bewildering number of options. The implicit assumption is that one must evaluate every option. This is an emotional reaction driven by fear of missing out.
Looking back on technologies that have come and gone, the best option was never an order of magnitude better than the second best option. We expect that the choices facing us now matter a great deal, despite knowing that similar decisions in the past didn’t matter that much.
Not only are some of our choices not so important, they don’t last so long either. We act as if we’re picking the technology we’re going to use for the rest of our lives. In reality, we may be picking the technology we’re going to use for the next year.
Very often it’s not worth the deliberation to pick the “best” technology. Pick a good one and don’t look back.
In general making a adequate choice and not looking back is usually a good strategy.
This was discussed in “The Paradox of Choice” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice) as ‘Satisficing”… “is a decision-making strategy that attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than to identify an optimal solution” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing)
j2ee – whatever it is.