FOMO: Fear of Missing Out

I would use the ACCU on Sea conference as an excuse for not writing an editorial; however, my talk was rejected so I didn’t go. Nonetheless, watching various social media posts about the conference drove the point home. For many years now, I have attended the ACCU conference, often as a speaker but sometimes paying as a delegate. The change to a combined conference with C++ on Sea was understandable – this saved costs for starters. I would love to have gone, but couldn’t justify the expense. Many conferences are having a hard time, partly because companies are less willing to pay for staff training and with dwindling recruitment in some areas, sponsors are harder to come by. Conferences usually offer great value for money, in terms of training, so this is a bad decision, in my opinion. If you, like me, missed out you can often volunteer at a conference to get a free ticket. You can even try to persuade your employer, if you have one, to pay. I am sure the ACCU general mailing list could help you write a convincing request and justification if you need one. Or, you could propose a talk and keep your fingers crossed. I need to up my game next time and write a more convincing proposal. On the plus side, I didn’t spend hours writing a talk, so have fewer excuses than usual for a lack of editorial. Sometimes a break is a good thing.

I don’t know about you, but I often go through a phase of saying ‘Yes’ to everything, and often regret it afterwards. I volunteered to be Overload’s editor when Ric Parkin, the previous editor, asked for someone to take over. Why? Partly, I thought it would make me actually take time to read all the articles. It has, but that wasn’t the most time-efficient way to solve that particular problem! Working with the review team is great, though be assured we do sometimes disagree. I have learnt a lot from doing this, even though I never can find a suitable editorial. As ever, if you want to be guest editor do get in touch.

Perhaps being the editor for an edition is too much. You could write an article instead. Or, become an ACCU member and then you have access to the homework puzzles and similar, along with book reviews (yes! Free books) and more besides. I wrote book reviews for ACCU to dip my toe into writing. I then went on to write an article for Overload about floating point numbers, inspired by a discussion I started on the ACCU general mailing list [Buontempo09]. The feedback helped me write a better article than I could have managed on my own. The experience also made me braver. Being proud of something you have created, with help, is a very special feeling.

I’d like to see more people writing for us. The members’ magazine, CVu, is a great place to start. You need to join ACCU to read the members’ magazine: if you’re not a member yet join us. A new series called ‘In conversation with…’ might work well. Get in touch – we can provide a few starter questions so new writers can chat with ACCU members and publish these in CVu. Then we can move on to finding more well-known people to chat with and write this up for Overload. People’s background stories are always interesting. For example, go check out the C++ documentary if you haven’t yet. It tells the story of C++, starting with “its origins in the corridors of Bell Labs to the global community it shapes today” [CultRepo].

Saying “Yes” to everything is all very well, but as I said it’s just a phase I go through sometimes. If I take a moment to reflect, I often realise I have over-committed. After all, you can’t do all the things. I knew I’d possibly gone too far when I said OK to playing a small part in a film. (It’s an independent comedy horror film – watch this space.) I now have to learn lines; I am not very good at memorizing things. What have I done? Maybe I was driven by fear of missing out (FOMO): a phrase commonly used. However, it’s more that I’d like to be supportive and it might be fun. I’m not afraid to miss out; I’m afraid to join in – but it’s good to push yourself once in a while and try something new. FOMO itself was coined about twenty years ago [Wikipedia-1], where it was contrasted with FOBO: fear of a better option. FOMO now has overtones of anxiety, stress and further psychological issues. I’m no expert but sometimes you just need to step back and spend times with friends. Even if that does mean learning lines for a film.

Sándor Dargó has shared a trip report about ACCU on Sea with us. He mentions Andrei Alexandrescu’s opening keynote, ‘The Next 20 Years of Systems Engineering’ [Alexandrescu26], which promised to look at history, language design and recent developments, including AI. ‘AI’ (specifically LLMs and agents) might prove to be a fad. We shall see. I have tinkered with various LLM chat apps, and some ‘AI’ in an IDE. I know about various ways to set up agents, but I have been watching from a distance. Initially, I had FOMO: there is so much to learn if you want to properly understand what is going on. However, I suspect there are still better options. You can let a machine spew forth code, which it can get right some of the time. However, I recall people blindly copying code from the internet years ago, and needing to bring some discipline to the process, including some unit tests. AI hasn’t made code craft go away. I do fear there is a better option than sacking all your devs and letting AI generate all the code. That is not to say you can’t get some value from AI, or even code you find on the internet. A tool is a tool; just use it sensibly.

When you spot a new technology, it is worth keeping an eye on it while being mindful that many things prove to be fads in the long run. Fax machines, anyone? Or even a mobile phone: how often do you upgrade yours? OK, hardware is one thing. Software has fads too. When Java became a thing, many people insisted that object-oriented programming was the future. It was, for a while, but people have been rediscovering functional approaches of late. Who can say where we will go next? Some new trends to seem to be here to stay. C++ was new once. As the aforementioned documentary points out, it is now one of the world’s most widely used programming languages. It has stood the test of time. Pen and paper is an even older technology that is still in use today. Exactly how old pens or paper are is difficult to say. As I understand it, ‘writing’ probably started with people scratching marks on various surfaces, including stone and clay tablets, which lead to cuneiform. Cuneiform consists of various wedge shaped signs, which are easy to make on such surfaces. It was in use in various forms from several thousand years BC [Wikipedia-2]. Whether C++ lasts as long is another matter. Some tech that just works has staying power.

What makes something stick, or even take hold in the first place? For starters, usage is vital, as we see with C++. Marketing also makes a difference: the choice of VHS (Video Home System: if you ever see a video tape, it’s probably one of these) rather than Betamax for videos was partly driven by marketing [Wikipedia-3]. Cuneiform fell out of fashion as pen and paper were adopted; similarly almost no-one owns a video player anymore. DVDs became popular, and now everyone just streams films and the like, right? Nothing lasts forever, but various technologies do stay in use for a long time. That makes it OK to sit back and see what happens when new technology rears its head, rather than FOMO driving you to spend hours learning something you will never use again. However, the act of learning does give you new ways to think about other, seemingly unrelated problems, so you could argue no learning is a waste of time. I was frequently asked “Miss, what’s the point of this?” when I taught maths. Sure, most of the pupils would never need to know about Pascal’s triangle or Pythagoras’ theorem later in life. However, I maintain that any maths can give you ways to think abstractly, and learning how to communicate those abstract ideas is a transferable skill.

Some innovations don’t take hold at the time. Babbage’s attempts to build early computers called difference and analytical engines springs to mind. From 1821 he tried to build ‘Difference Engine Number 1’, but ran out of funding, leaving it part done. He then tried to build a ‘general purpose programmable computing engine’ [CHM], now called an analytical engine. Probably regarded as a slightly odd waste of time and money back then, we can now see how innovative he was. Babbage did actually start building some of his ideas. In contrast, Leonardo da Vinci left us several sketches for helicopters and other flying machines, like gliders. These were not built at the time, but many mock-up versions have been made since For example, see the model at the Museo Leonardiano Vinci [MLV]. Many creations are ahead of their time. Perhaps you could say the same for electric vehicles? The first cars were electric. Starting with an electric motor in 1827, an electric locomotive that could manage a whopping 4 miles per hour was built in 1838 [Wikipedia-4]. By the 1920s, petrol cars had become the norm. FOBO? Well, gasoline power didn’t need a hand crank to start, and mass production made them cheaper. Yet today, the better option is seen to be electric vehicles, at least in terms of environmental impact. History often gives examples of ideas being parked and picked up later on. The reappearance of functional programming is an instance. C++20 introduced coroutines, which also have a long history. To quote Ecclesiastes 1:19:

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

If you feel like you are getting left behind and possibly de-skilled as new ideas, frameworks, even programming languages become popular, don’t panic. On a surprisingly large number of occasions, I ended up using and modifying some FORTRAN code during my career. I have nothing against FORTRAN: it’s a great language but I don’t know it very well. It allows you to vectorise calculations, and has done for a long time. You thought C++26’s data-parallel types, or SIMD, was new [CppRef]? There’s nothing new under the sun… I digress. Being asked to deal with FORTRAN made my heart sink. Other people were playing with newer tech and I was concerned what my CV would look like. I did miss out of some trending tech, but I will argue that I learnt and used various more timeless tools. If you are spotting new trends and haven’t had the chance to try them out, it can go one of two ways. Either take it as an opportunity to learn at future some point when you have time: put together a talk proposal or article and see what happens. Or sit back, relax, get the popcorn and see what transpires. If you miss one thing, you might get a chance to do something that’s a better option.

References

[Alexandrescu26] Andrei Alexandrescu ‘The Next 20 Weeks of Systems Engineering’ delivered at ACCU on Sea 2026 and available at https://accuonsea.uk/2026/sessions/the-next-20-weeks-of-systems-engineering/

[Buontempo09] Frances Buontempo ‘Floating Point Fun and Frolics’ in Overload 17(91), June 2009, available at https://accu.org/journals/overload/17/91/buontempo_1558/

[CHM] Computer History Museum ‘The Engines’, available at
https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/engines/

[CppRef] Data-parallel types (SIMD): https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/numeric/simd

[CultRepo26] CultRepo, released 4 June 2026, ‘The Story of C++: The World’s Most Consequential Programming Language | The Official Story’ available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI7tMxzSJ7w

[MLV] Museo Leonardiano Vinci ‘Flying Machine’, available at https://museoleonardiano.it/en/opera/flying-machine/

[Wikipedia-1] Fear of Missing Out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

[Wikipedia-2] Cuneiform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform

[Wikipedia-3] Videotape format war: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war

[Wikipedia-4] History of the electric vehicle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle

Frances Buontempo has a BA in Maths + Philosophy, an MSc in Pure Maths and a PhD using AI and data mining. She’s written a book about machine learning called Genetic Algorithms and Machine Learning for Programmers, and one to help you catch up with C++ called Learn C++ by Example. She has been a programmer since the 90s, and learnt to program by reading the manual for her Dad’s BBC model B machine.