Hype Cycle placement for a given technology

Question

We've all participated in discussions about whether or not a given technology has proven itself sufficiently to be used for a given purpose. In our organization, we were instructed to pursue technologies that had made it past the "Trough of Disillusionment" in the Gartner Hype Cycle.

Are there legitimate free resources online to determine where a given technology falls on the hype cycle? Or is this information only available to Gartner customers? Are there other ways of judging the same thing?

I ask because we've been looking into learning new programming technologies and I certainly don't want us to pick one that is at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" today and completely disregarded 6 months from now. I also don't want to ask our Enterprise Architecture team to look up info on each technology we're interested in.

Answer 1

The only way to know something like this is to rely on your own expertise or the expertise of people who really know about programming languages and the industry context. You could do worse than to ask Stack Overflow!

If you're going to do that, you might want to make your question quite specific: set out your criteria for whether a language is suitable or not. For example, Clojure might be judged to have inflated expectations in terms of its likely adoption in industry, but expectations may be accurate for its long-term influence on future language developments in other JVM languages.