But here's the thing. How many technology choices does fashion dictate? I've seen fashion determine huge amounts of technology choices, and wheels get reinvented constantly in this industry as a result.

In 2006ish I did a talk about MVC JavaScript at a tiny FooCamp in Albuquerque. At the time people were all excited about Rails MVC, and I was like, "hey, initially MVC was for GUIs, and Ajax is headed towards GUIs." Because of that, it was easy to see that this particular wheel was headed for imminent reinvention.

It's easy to sneer at individuals for making technology choices based on fashion, but that's petty. Take a minute to look at communities making technology choices based on fashion. The periodic re-invention of wheels in programming mirrors the cyclical nature of fashion in terms of what people wear.

Embarrassing fashion confession: I used to be a raver in the 90s. I wore big baggy jeans. In the disco era, people wore pants like that. They called them flares in the UK and bell-bottoms in the US. Clothing fashions cycle, and programmer fashions cycle too.

If fashion is dictating an entire community's technology choices, you can learn something about the fundamental problem they're solving by asking yourself what wheel they're re-inventing, and looking into the history of computer science a little to see how programmers solved it last time.