I've found that "I don't even get what the word is supposed to mean" is someone's first experience with tech fear. In my experience (including my own personal anecdata) they tend to mean "I don't want to learn this new thing and because of that I'm worried I'll be left behind if everyone switches to this"
I also don’t get this. I’ve been programming either professionally or personally for 30+ years. But this isn’t a new phenomenon.
Back in the early 90s you had an “Apple II Forever” movement with people still holding on to their 8 bit Apple //e’s while Apple and the rest of the world moved on.
> I've found that "I don't even get what the word is supposed to mean" is someone's first experience with tech fear.
This is a gross misrepresentation of the actual problem affecting the "serverless" fad, which is the buzzword overload accompanied by a lack of objective definitions. Function-as-a-service (FaaS) is an objective, clear-cut concept, but "serverless computing" is supposed to be a more general term where FaaS is only a realization of the concept. Yet, by keeping the concept as a buzzword then the proponents actually avoid having to argue the merits and the advantages of this sort of architecture, thus contributing to the growing skepticism.
"Cloud" has gotten even less specific technically as new marketing uses for it become established. What do bare metal private cloud and Google Docs have in common, anyone?
As I wrote in another comment, there is a world of software outside of web development. And I'm not especially fearful of being left behind. I spend almost all my free time learning new things. But I wouldn't really jump at the opportunity of learning something that locks me into a single company's services. Learning the fundamentals of computers seems like a much better use of my time.
A lot of concepts that apply to serverless and other cloud computing services are applicable across providers as well. Even if the details are different.
I would liken it to learning programming languages. Learning new languages isn't considered "locking you into a language". It's even widely considered beneficial because it makes learning more languages even easier and brings new perspectives to the table.
Edit: An interesting example. Learning something enough to know when NOT to use it is gaining a valuable skill that's worth $$ to employers.
> I would liken it to learning programming languages. Learning new languages isn't considered "locking you into a language". It's even widely considered beneficial because it makes learning more languages even easier and brings new perspectives to the table.
Partly true, if you don't plan on using the language. But this seems only true, because the majority of programming languages today are open source and portable across different platforms. On the other hand, some time ago C# implied .Net Framework and that would lock you into the Microsoft+Windows ecosystem.
In the same way, using SQL that's understood only by PostgreSQL isn't going to be as much painful as using something specific to Oracle databases when the company behind it goes haywire as Oracle did with Java (if not for OpenJDK).
Because after you have “learned the fundamentals” it takes a lot longer to “learn” how to write a function that takes in two parameters, zip it up with all of your dependencies and upload it....
