Re: Hype Pro 4 0 38
Josephine Heathershaw
The Gartner hype cycle is a graphical presentation developed, used and branded by the American research, advisory and information technology firm Gartner to represent the maturity, adoption, and social application of specific technologies. The hype cycle claims to provide a graphical and conceptual presentation of the maturity of emerging technologies through five phases.[1]
Hype (in the more general media sense of the term "hype"[3]) plays a large part in the adoption of new media. Analyses of the Internet in the 1990s featured large amounts of hype,[4][5][6] and that created "debunking" responses.[3] A longer-term historical perspective on such cycles can be found in the research of the economist Carlota Perez.[7] Desmond Roger Laurence, in the field of clinical pharmacology, described a similar process in drug development in the seventies.[citation needed]
There have been numerous criticisms[8][9][10][11] of the hype cycle, prominent among which are that it is not a cycle, that the outcome does not depend on the nature of the technology itself, that it is not scientific in nature, and that it does not reflect changes over time in the speed at which technology develops. Another is that it is limited in its application, as it prioritizes economic considerations in decision-making processes. It seems to assume that a business' performance is tied to the hype cycle, whereas this may actually have more to do with the way a company devises its branding strategy.[citation needed] A related criticism is that the "cycle" has no real benefits to the development or marketing of new technologies and merely comments on pre-existing trends. Specific disadvantages when compared to, for example, technology readiness level are:
An analysis of Gartner Hype Cycles since 2000[11] shows that few technologies actually travel through an identifiable hype cycle, and that in practice most of the important technologies adopted since 2000 were not identified early in their adoption cycles.
One important component of hype is thus a set of promises of what the technology can achieve in the future for you dear reader. These might range from solving a particularly annoying problem to creating new markets, making you heaps of money, or even revolutionizing a whole field and changing society as a whole.
It has been suggested that genomic research is frequently inappropriately hyped, in both the popular press and the scientific literature, and that this hype has the potential to create a range of social concerns. This paper maps the complex array of social forces that contribute to the phenomenon of hype, including the pressure to publish, the increasingly intense commercialization agenda, the messaging emanating from research institutions, the news media and, even, the public itself. These numerous and interrelated factors create a 'hype pipeline' that will be difficult to counter without the utilization of a wide range of policy strategies.
Ah, but Bun is surely different? Right? I mean, it's written with ZIG! And ZIG! is super fast.... right? Eh, not really. It isn't doing anything magical, ultimately any performance you can achieve with it could be achieved with C++ (what Node.js is written in). So, just like with the story of old slow npm, once performance was prioritized, npm was able to go just as fast (faster even) than the competition. I can see a similar thing happening with Node. If given the proper attention, roughly equivalent speeds should be possible to the point where the differences are negligible. Well... kinda. I mean, we should probably acknowledge the fact that some of the benchmarks Bun brags about are cherry-picked or misrepresentative. So, even Bun doesn't live up to its own marketing hype. But you get the point.
Okay, so Yarn came around, forced npm to get better, and then died. What's the problem? If that's all it did, then Yarn would have been great, but sadly it wasn't. npm was focused on developing and releasing the features the vast majority of users needed. But Yarn was focused on the features Facebook needed. Many of which were not important for 99% of people using npm. However, once people started using Yarn, npm had to repriortize what features they would develop and release. Instead of delivering higher value features that would be more relevant to more users, they had to quickly play catch up and add equivalent features to what Yarn was offering, as to avoid a split in the ecosystem. But Yarn marketed itself very well, and people bought into the hype. Even I was hyped for Yarn when it came out, until I found out it didn't actually run on Windows. But others didn't realize, or didn't care about that, and adopted it... and... and...
A. Completely ignore all of the new users for the next year and focus solely on getting complete feature parity and making a polished, rock-solid, reliable, ultra-fast, Windows compatible build. Likely killing off any momentum they built from their initial hype-cycle, and maybe even losing them the VC funding they've been living off of.
B. Focus almost all of their very small team's efforts on keeping their existing user's happy by improving the Linux/OSX versions that already mostly work so that the product looks well maintained and can slowly gain adoption within those communities, while being virally spread by tribal developers intentionally creating non-portable code, knowing that it will not work in Node, or even on Windows.
I've been very hard on Bun in this post, not because it sucks, but because it's almost good. And people will be excited to try it out and not realize all the downsides. Again, just like with Yarn, I was pretty hyped for Bun too. But I've since tempered my excitement and looked at it from a practical, and historical, standpoint.
But Lighter also points out a number of other senses of hype that have emerged over the years: as a noun, a heroin or morphine addict (by 1924), a shortchange swindle or (any) con game (by 1925), a sudden steep but usually impermanent rise in retail price (by 1926), a misleading or exaggerated story (by 1938), and overblown publicity or advertising (by 1958); as an adjective, fraudulent (by 1978), and impressive or outstanding (by 1989); as a verb, to swindle or cheat (by 1914), to cajole or mislead (by 1938), (often as hype up) to inject via hypodermic needle (by 1938), (often as hype up) to make more exciting (by 1942), (often as hype up) to make more excited (by 1946), (often as hype up) to increase or inflate (by 1947), (in carnival cant) to charge more than the usual rate for merchandise (by 1950), and to promote aggressively (by 1959).
hyped-up adj. Artificial, phony, as though produced by a hypodermic injection of a stimulant. 1950: "No fireworks [in this movie], no fake suspense, no hyped-up glamour." Billy Rose, synd[icated] newsp[aper] col[umn], Jan. 9.
On the other hand, Tony Thorne, The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (1990), and Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, revised edition (1997), assert that the promotional senses of hype have their source in the word hyperbole. From Thorne:
hype vb, n (to create) excessive, overblown or misleading publicity. A term applied first to the activities of the pop music industry in the early 1970s, hype is a shortening of hyperbole. The word was apparently in use in the USA for many years among swindlers and tricksters before becoming part of commercial jargon (where it is now widespread).
hype, hyperbole. Although there lived in the fourth century B.C. an Athenian demagogue named Hyperbolus given to exaggerated statement, hi name dos not give us the word hyperbole, or hype, as it is abbreviated today. Hyperbole derives from the Greek hyper, "over," plus bole, "throw," which conveys the idea of excess or exaggeration. Hyperbolus was just appropriately named.
hype2 1 v by 1937 To blatantly promote: [citation omitted] 2 n Advertising or promotion, esp of a blatant sort: [citation omitted] 3 v by 1914 To trick, deceive,; originally to short-change 4 v by 1938 =HYPE UP ["To fake, manufacture; invent; =HOKE" or "To promote or advertise by blatant, obnoxious means" or "To give something a false impact, appeal, energy, etc."] origin unknown; perhaps related to hyper, "hustle," of obscure origin, found from the mid-1800s; recent advertising and public relations senses probably influenced by hype1 as suggesting supernormal energy, excitement, etc., and by hyper2 and hyperbole; sense 4 supported by a 1914 glossary: "Hyper, current among money-changer. A flim-flammer"
hyper2 1 adj by 1942 Overexcited; manic; over-wrought; =HYPED UP: [citations omitted] 2 adj by 1970s Exceeding most; very superior;: [citation omitted] fr Greek hyper, "super," and in the first sense probably fr medical terms like hyperactive, hyperkinetic, hyperthyroid, etc; in some sources this term is associated with hipped and hippish, fr hypochondriac, "melancholic," first found in the early 18th century
And finally John Ayto & John Simpson, The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang (1992), splits the hype entries into what it deems clearly hypodermic related and not clearly hypodermic related senses, but declines to hazard an opinion about the origin of the latter:
Hypodermic is clearly the source word for the narcotics-related meanings of hype; but the origin or origins of the senses associated with deception, fraud, exaggeration, intensive promotion, and (as an adjective) manic or overexcited behavior remain very much in dispute.
I think it is perfectly logical that the 'excitement' use of the word would evolve naturally from the original 'exaggeration' (hyperbole). The exaggeration was made in order to generate excitement. So referring to the excitement generated with the same word is quite understandable. (I'll come back with another example of that if I can think of one.)
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