Another year (another month), another set of vapid news posts that proclaim language $x or platform $y has won, whatever that means, for the latest astrological milestone.

Sure, it's fun to treat programming and technology as a horse race, where someone must win and someone must lose, but if you're in the business of solving real problems to help real people do important things (I'm in the business of just that), there comes a time at which you have to decide between inflating the stats to edge ahead in that horse race or getting things done.

(Someone more cynical than me might suggest that you consider who promotes certain technologies and the horse race mentality and what they want you to spend your money on—consulting fees, books, conferences, collaboration services they just so happen to sell, their venture capital contests—but I'm not that cynical, so forget I just typed that.)

For example, as much as you hear that HTML 5 is the future, that all applications will be mobile, running with JavaScript or some sort of compatibility shim at the worst, consider how many microprocessors shipped last year, microprocessors which get programmed with one of assembly, C, or C++. These run your car, your microwave, your phone, your electric toothbrush, your appliances, your watch, almost everything.

These billions of devices don't show up in a Google Trends search because they're ubiquitous. That is popularity, not what shows up most in Hacker News threads.

By all means talk about the wonderful things you're building to solve real problems for paying customers. (I hear there's an office full of people in Taiwan whose lives I make a little bit easier several times a week. Sometimes it's Perl. Sometimes it's a little bit of JavaScript, yes. Sometimes it's SQL. Sometimes it's a tiny shell script. Today I almost even wrote some C.)

Yet don't confuse the incessant sound and fury of the horse race and the propaganda it represents with actually doing things.

(Alternate title: While you were writing your own web server at the bare metal layer with Node.js, I saved one of my clients a million dollars.)