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Ask HN: What's a technology that died that you wished was still here

14 points by burtonator ↗ HN
We're always talking about the latest trendy tech but I'm curious what older technologies you wish would have been more successful.

I'm personally a fan of lisp and wish it would have had a more prominent place in tech history.

It would have also been better if Java was Open Source about a decade before it was ... but that ship has sailed.

27 comments

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maxharris
John Backus's FL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxcT4vK01-w

IBM research really should release the FL compiler they wrote! They stopped working on it in the early 90s, and haven't said a single thing about it since.

There is the beginnings of a Haskell implementation that I tried to mess with a bit, but I don't know enough Haskell to get anywhere: https://github.com/jgrimes/fl-hs

a-saleh
Rumour has it that J language could be a good successor to FL? But trying to learnin an APL dialect after I just finished learning Golang is ... tricky to say the least :)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
motyar
RSS

and

xmpp

a-saleh
RSS still seems to be alive in the podcasting world :-)
tomjen3
I got here through a RSS link. Would still use XMPP if it there were other users on it.
karmakaze
Cross platform application development, aka Rich Internet Application (RIA): Adobe AIR, MS Silverlight, JavaFX.

Some of these continue to exist but seem to lack adoption and/or prominent support.

thedevindevops
Can you elaborate on this a little bit, I'm curious as to what you miss about them
karmakaze
Portable efficient application development that is higher level than C and without the bloat and unnecessary abstraction of Electron.

Also a distribution model that isn't dependent on a third party's app store.

thedevindevops
Would a Java app, suit your circumstances?
karmakaze
Close, but there's no distribution since WebStart was killed off (rightly so it had unending vulnerabilities).
ScottFree
> (rightly so it had unending vulnerabilities)

That's exactly why those technologies died off. Flash and Java have massive security issues that neither Adobe nor Oracle are capable of fixing.

That said, you should be pretty happy about WASM then.

MH15
Can't you do nearly all of this with modern JavaScript?
karmakaze
HotJava Browser with the idea of being able to efficiently run sandboxed code.

There was briefly a thought that Chrome might bundle DartVM but the Dart v1 in the browser effort was a failure.

karmakaze
Lotus Improv. Closest today are Quantrix and maybe Airtable.
gtsteve
I think Mercurial deserved to win the mindshare war. It had an easier to use command-line, but I liked how branches were handled.

Like many teams, we'd start a branch with an issue number and you'd write code to it. Eventually you'd merge it to your main branch for the product.

You of course can do the same in Git. However, let's say you just find a given line of code and you can't think how it came to be there. You 'blame' the file and find the commit hash.

In Mercurial, you'd just look up the commit hash and find the branch. In git... well, you've got a few options - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2706797/finding-what-bra...

Git won the war for some reason and it might just be because the services surrounding it were superior (i.e. Github vs Bitbucket). I don't believe it's because of it being a superior technology or user experience however.

Of course, you can still use Mercurial today but you'll feel like a second-class citizen if you do.

mrfusion
Has anyone said Visual Basic 6 yet? It was a pretty nice language and the ui design tools were really nice and intuitive.
a-saleh
My first language! Learned in 2001? Especially the form-builder was really nice!

Later on (2006-maybe?) I preffered writing in java, i.e. generics and for-each and checked-exceptions were awesome in my opinion, I think I solved like half of my programming problems by just importing TreeMap :D , but I still missed the VB6 form-builder :)

soulchild37
Native windows / mac app development, even well funded company like Slack / Discord want to save development cost by sacrificing battery life / performance of the user's computer.
frou_dh
Plan 9 OS, if only so that the wider Unix/Linux culture would have been knocked out of the trance that TUIs in Terminal Emulators are the pinnacle.
zzo38computer
Less messy computer designs. Computers with RS-232. The old IBM PC Model F keyboard (even with unlimited rollover). The .DVI (device independent) file format for printing. GOTO and GOSUB commands in programming languages. Unencrypted analog television. The PC BIOS (UEFI is terrible). BASIC and/or Forth in ROM.
superasn
Borland Delphi. It was a really amazing way to create Windows programs without worrying about vcredist, etc.

Super small exe files that just run on any windows platform from Win xp to Windows 10(?).

Also ready made components for almost everything on torry.net!

Jugurtha
As a teenager I tried Delphi 6 after programming in Visual Basic (DOS and Windows). I already knew Pascal and wanted to try it out.

My reaction after building the executable: wait, is that just one file? Do you mean I don't have to worry about all the crap with VBRUN432.DLL and all the other files that made my program not look cool?

The executables were already small, and I used ASPack to compress them even further. I coded fun utilities like file patchers, and some interesting network programs.

I couldn't get back to it a few years later because there was this Embarcadero thing that I felt got in the way.