Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. Some say that this is just the definition of denial or stupidity which may evolve into insanity.
Denial and stupidity (and sometimes insanity) can be permanent or temporary. I believe that in IT we (developers) have all been (temporarily) insane, or in denial, or simply stupid at least once in our professional careers.
Over the years (and it is about 25 years now) I have been working with many different technologies, libraries, languages, development tools, hardware, techniques, methodologies, frameworks, approaches, models, layers, subsystems, interfaces, components, controls, devices, ...
From time to time I fell in love with a particular thing and I simply refused to let go even when it was clear that that particular thing was going nowhere. I was in denial or maybe just stupid. Fortunately it didn't last too long and at one point I happily embraced the next generation of the thing and managed to improve my knowledge and skills using what I had learned with the previous technology.
I was able to transfer my knowledge from the old to the new always improving a bit and always being able to gain more than if I had switched to the new prematurely. At least I like to think so.
My latest state of denial lasted from about the year 1999 to approximately 2002, when I first started working on our migration technology.
During that time I kept downloading patches hoping to see improvements and bug fixes, kept writing my own workarounds and low level code, and kept hacking away trying to fix the unfixable. I wrote my own libraries and components, learned low level Windows APIs, database drivers, ActiveX/COM technology, etc... I produced an enourmous amount of work trying to do things that other developers simply took for granted!
See? My insanity forced me to learn things that are now extremely useful since with .NET and our support library I have to deal with very similar issues. Fortunately now I can directly influence the process and can have fixes out immediately instead of waiting months for the next useless patch.
Sound familiar?
If it does, take a deep breath, look around, search around the internet a bit and try to make an honest evaluation to determine if it's really worth it to stick to that particular thing that is driving you nuts.
Thanks to Google you can find, evaluate and compare just about anything today. There are no more reasonable excuses for staying in denial, it will morph into insanity very soon.