Approaches that become popular and highly publicized definitely impact everyone else's work in that field. Teams decide to migrate to those approaches, discarding others, based on perceived popularity, shallow impressions, small amounts of experimentation. Often, this is all we have to go on. But team members who have an intuition that the approach may have more problems than are first visible now have a choice, to either silently go along with the new decision, or to document their reservations. The anger is an issue though. It's a product of when you perceive a waterfall of hype crashing over your own perception of better judgment (please note: perception. subjective viewpoint). It's worth it to try adjusting those perceptions since anger doesn't really get you anywhere.
We're all aware of the Internet Hype Machine. We've all been duped by it before. Heck, my big project today consists of frantic backpedaling from an overly hasty decision, prompted by the IHM, to use SQLite in a project that had no business being based on SQLite. We should all be open to hearing criticism about choices to use X or Y technology.
-But- if you start by saying, "You're so stupid," then the person you're talking to will start by thinking, "You're such a jerk." And nobody really pays much attention to the opinions of people they think are jerks.
People need to understand that decisions should be made based on the team's current skill set. If your team is comprised of Java developers, time shouldn't be wasted on researching node.js; rather they should focus on how to leverage their Java knowledge with Scala. It frustrates me to hear people falling for the hype machine and falling hard when they could have easily avoided by asking themselves two questions: what's the path of least resistance to shipping our product out the door, and what's the opportunity costs relative to alternative paths?
Good point. I think a lot of people who build commercial software have rather limited choice in which tools they use. They can choose how to use those tools and what to advocate publicly. If the hype about something forces me to use deficient tools, I will be angry it and vocal about it, because I care.
