Ask: Why there are no discussions on tech stacks?

[InGodsName]

Previously, there were many discussions offering insights about many technologies.

But these days, no one talks about any webframework or ORM here on Hacker News.

Is it being censored? How are people building startups these days, what frameworks and technologies are they using?

[lkrubner]

Once upon a time there were huge differences in major web frameworks. Compare Zope 2.0 to Ruby On Rails 1.0 and you are looking at 2 very different paradigms. Nowadays, all the major frameworks have stolen the same ideas from each other. Django and Symfony and Ruby On Rails all steal ideas from each other (mostly the other two steal ideas from Rails).

Also, there has arisen a cultural moment on Hacker News that says it is useless to argue about languages. So, for instance, many of us wish to write comments that are critical of PHP. We are downvoted if we do so, and someone inevitably repeats the cant "You can write bad code in any language."

So the frameworks are much more similar than they used to be, and arguing about languages is considered inappropriate. So we end up with less discussions about tech stacks.

There was also the unusual period, from about 2010 to 2016, when there was an explosion of frameworks for Javascript. That was not normal. And that has now settled down, as folks now use either React or Vue or Angular. The hundreds of other frameworks that were discussed here have now mostly been forgotten.

There are a few ecosystems that are still doing very interesting new things, such as Clojure, and sometimes you'll see articles about that. But I agree it is a smaller percentage of articles than in the past.