Commented: Is “Mature” a four letter word in tech?

(This might be more for my benefit than yours, but I’m experimenting with reposting here any (relevant) comments I write on other blogs – partly to make it easier to track my past conversations for replies, since they’re now all in a category, and partly to capture my thoughts as a general log of the kinds of things I’m thinking about on any given day.)

Responding to Jeffrey Palermo’s post “Is Classic WebForms more mature than ASP.NET MVC?“:

It’s interesting that we seem to work in a field where “mature” is almost a derogatory adjective on par with “classic,” and to be sure there can be additional considerations in more established platforms, like compatibility hacks, layers of hotfixes, increased complexity as versions go up, and other stuff that WebForms doesn’t necessarily have, but need to be taken into account. There’s always something appealing about starting off with a new technology and a relatively clean slate.

If you replace “mature” with any of “robust,” “ready for prime time,” “supportable,” etc you can end up with different discussions altogether, and like you pointed out, good development practices can shift the priorities of any of these debates.

Behind the scenes DVD commentary: it felt weird to post something that was more of an observation than a specific answer or question, but I thought it was worth noting – though time will tell if an observational comment will work posted here without the greater context of the original post…