Some of those are really funny, but the one by adw nailed it.
>adw on Jan 1, 2010 [-]
>Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.
>That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
Thank you! There are still lessons to be learned from the early data journalism community, which is what got me thinking about this at the time; Craigslist eating classified advertising and Facebook eating display created this kind of apocalyptic burst of desperate creativity which didn’t save news but pointed in a bunch of important directions which haven’t been fully followed up.
What a fun read! The one that ended up being the most off in the thread:
> I predict (and hope for) a major turn back to simplicity in technologies. Multimillion-line software will go extinct like dinosaurs. Existing programming languages and platforms will gradually be replaced with ones so simple and elegant that one software component will be written and maintained by one to three developers and art designers and not a whole software company packed with managers and other unnecessary staff. Oh, and managers along with poeple who "understand" "software business" but not software will hopefully go extinct too.
If I can predict anything for 2030 based on this, it will be software being even more complex, with even more frameworks and abstractions.
I'd say that this prediction is describing current developments quite well. Newer programming languages (Go, Rust) and development tools are making the "software as lean independent components" vision more relevant than it ever was.
Someone really needs to crack simple generic type systems with native levels of performance to get all of this to work.
Performance comes from optimizing the usage of state against hardware, modularity comes from code satisfying the properties of composition which is best left stateless (and high levels of modularity must come from abstraction and conventional practice, incurring further debts on the programmer and machine.)
It's a tension that I haven't seen fully resolved but I'm very very very open to being wrong. Many languages seem to be experimenting in this space with some preference for one side of the equation for another.
> Someone really needs to crack simple generic type systems with native levels of performance to get all of this to work.
We know how this works, at least in broad theoretical terms. Zero-cost abstractions are quite feasible within a self-contained module/component, but their scope is ultimately limited by ease of building and deployment. Nevertheless the performance impact of having to support high levels of abstraction across modules/components is quite reasonable, even if not literally "zero" cost.
I'm thinking supercompilation might be another part of the equation as long as we're talking extended composition of modules and types whose behavior is totally closed. Having a pipeline that can supercompile when systems are pushed in production even if some compilation time is traded for performance at development (maybe "local" supercompilation for subsystems relevant to a development team?) would be an interesting thing. But I don't know.
Some have noted that JIT systems perform many of the same things as supercompilation, and it seems reasonable to consider that JIT is part of the equation for optimising performance when systems are pushed to production. We've been doing that for decades now, with increasing sophistication in the details. Profile driven, multiple stages of specialisation and optimisation.
Not quite to the levels of proof systems (and therefore supercompilation as envisioned) yet - there's plenty of room to get better at it - and we need to go there if we want those "zero cost abstractions" across modules that aren't designed for it, often with significant impedance mismatches.
He is quoting from 2010 and predicts the very opposite and I fully support the claim. Reasons:
* industry has either no interest or capacity in quality
* software flaws may cause severe harm but will play no role for the majority of the industry. it is a gamble just like vc business.
* pace of change/inonnovation will actually add even more harm
* excellence in the field will decrease because the baseline compexity is already too high, people will specialize probably in ML/AI/fin.
One chance I see is that the industry runs into a major HR crisis and some smart players understand that the complexity cannot be maintained by "developers" or "software engineers" anymore and come up with solutions other than opening up more positions.
I think inherent complexity can only be fixed by better monitoring. Visual tools, monitoring, real time feedback are all things humans can use to get a better grasp of the innards of things.
We could use a lot more of it in software.
Nothing can fix unnecessary complexity. It will continue to affect every tool used to maintain it.
Ditto for Javascript. When I first used React in 2015 I thought it might be a harbinger for unix philosophy tools in the web space. A lib with a simple API that solves a single hard problem with a good implementation under the hood.
What I never predicted was the sheer enormity of the useless cruft the community would build around it. I used to contribute to some of the React community places (particularly irc), and in the early days the discussion there was super interesting. Now it's just endless waves of "I'm building X and having Y problem with dependency Z" where Z is something I've never used because it looks shit, Y is something I haven't encountered in 3 years, and X is something I could build in my sleep with just plain old React.
I've always wondered if Java devs feel the same, or if they're happy drowning in whatever crap is in their ecosystem? Like, do they all love Java but hate every single code base they have to work on? Or is that a uniquely JS problem?
Framework and language complexity is just a cycle thing. Someone makes a new language/framework that's minimal, clean, and suited to what people need. Needs change, or people miss certain things, it gets bloated, and the cycle repeats.
Except for C and C++. C just gets better, C++ just keeps growing.
betcha if there were prediction thread for another decade, people will post how Google will be turned into former bell labs and eventually seize to exist.
Thinking back to Satya Nadella's book, I still think its incredible that he was selected, and even after it was incredible that he the impact that he had. I guess where I'm getting with this is that to have been able to see and recognize that he had the potential to take Microsoft in the right direction and that he actually was able to take them there is pretty awesome. They could have hired someone from outside, or someone who might fit the look / character of a mega corp CEO but they took a risk with him and I'm glad that it paid off.
for what its worth, Ballmer was apparently a massive, massive sponsor of Satya all the way to the top. Satya wouldnt have happened without Ballmer. for all his flaws as CEO, he did one thing right.
I disagree, I think anyone the put in charge would have done well. Satya came in during one of the biggest bull runs in history and just surfed the wave. Even Ballmer would have had a hard time to stop that.
Surface, Azure, Minecraft, Github, VSCode and the whole renewed developer focus... those seem like pretty strong shifts and not just 'surfing the wave'.
They are. Microsoft, especially under Ballmer, was notoriously anti-OSS (open-source). Not only did Satya make the decision to shift the company to be cloud focused, he represented a change of guard when it was critically important to make peace with the open-source community.
You don't become a $1.2T company by surfing a wave. Its stock price has more than quintupled. IBM's stock price is almost flat over 10 years. GE is down over the decade. Changing direction for a ship that large is very, very hard--a seemingly intractable problem but not for the model Microsoft has provided.
My gut response to his thought of MS pivoting to consulting a la IBM was way off but after thinking about it for a minute you could kind of make a case that Azure is a form of "self-serve operationalized consulting", he was just off on it's impact and success by a factor of 50 or 100.
There was one comment in the thread about what Steve Jobs will do at the end of the decade. As a ghost I suppose? (Another says he will step down due to his health, which is closer.)
My favorite is the joke that Zuck will buy Portugal.
You have to remember that in 2010, Windows was still saving its reputation from Vista, Office was stale, and OneDrive didn’t exist. I don’t think Azure did, and if so it was more enterprise focused.
Nadella’s excellent pivoting of MS into a cloud and services focused company saved Microsoft from a stagnant or declining state.
> - The next big thing will be something totally unknown and unpredictable now, as user-generated content and social networking were in 1999. However, when it does appear, various 'experts' on it will spring from nowhere to lecture us all about it. It will still be really cool, though.
I suppose that partly depends on exactly how novel the blockchain part is, but broadly speaking the world of efforts to combine some of electronic money, cryptography, proof of work and decentralisation was not a new one in the late 2000s. For example Ecash had been hot once https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecash , while later on Hashcash got a fair bit of attention as a possible solution to the spam crisis. In 2007 (early 2010 is another story) it was definitely more of a deep cut than AI or cloud, though.
It replaces trust with massive resource consumption and doesn't do a good job of being digital money (it is hard to use safely, it is hard to use anonymously).
It is cool because it really disintermediates powerful entities. Maybe the first iteration of digital money/assets is not that efficient, but that could also be argued for many other innovative technologies.
What is groundbreaking is the concept of P2P value exchange. And that's what bitcoin really is, still a young PoC that will surely evolve or get superseded by a 2.0 tech.
definitely Bitcoin/Blockchain. I wouldn't say it will actually disrupt traditional banking empires, but it was the next big thing and 'experts' definitely came out of nowhere and its still pretty cool.
Regarding deep fakes, I don't think you're wrong, just early. I think we are just getting a glimpse of what is unfortunately possible as this decade closes out, they could introduce some real chaos as in this new decade.
AI wasn't totally unknown: basically every coastal university during the 1970s and 1980s were filled with people working on AI, and it didn't die off, it just became embarrassing to work on.
Neither was user generated content (that's what the original web was) or social networking (irc, email, bulletin boards, etc). Making it useful and usable beyond an academic and techie niche was new.
> Neither was user generated content (that's what the original web was)
The fall and return of the cat picture still amuses me. In the early days of Web adoption when people would put up a personal home page just for the thrill of having one, stereotypically the only bits of content they would be able to come up with for it were a list of favourite bands and one or more scanned-in pictures of their cat. So for years and years afterwards cat pictures were a synechdote, a punchline for jokes about the naïvety of the early Web. Then phone cameras and low-effort social media became big, and ...
And more, the AI hype-cycle was definitely on the upswing again already by the beginning of 2010. The Netflix Prize and the motor-vehicle DARPA Grand Challenges were all 2000s events, for instance.
Not at all unforeseen by the end of 2009 though. The GMail beta dates to 2004, while EC2 was announced by 2006, and that's aside from all older precedents or predictions. (That said, not everyone 'got' EC2 at first.)
The dynamic languages slower than ruby prediction didn't hold up either. The past ten years have just seen nibbling around the edges for dynamic languages, without any compelling ideas about how to make them fundamentally more expressive.
Doesn’t that describe the rise of JavaScript? I haven’t done or seen any specific benchmarks, but I gathered that JS was among the slowest of languages.
Chrome and V8 were released in 2008, and Node.js (which leverages V8) in 2009. V8 was already considered fast back then. Mozilla and Apple also focused on optimizing their JS stack in the following years.
No, it really wasn't. You had to use it in really specific ways and it had all sorts of gotchas. One I vaguely remember is that if an array got too big performance would tank like crazy.
Google’s marketing for Chrome and V8 was incredibly effective. We’ve basically forgotten that Mozilla, Adobe and Apple were pushing JS perf long before V8 was released. Memory usage of early V8 was atrocious and real world performance was barely improved over Safari and Firefox but Google dominated dev mindshare for a decade.
No, Mozilla and Apple didn't release their JIT engines until after Chrome (though I think at least Apple was working on theirs) and so when Chrome came out JS immediately got about 4x faster, which was a bigger improvement than had happened over the entire previous lifetime of JS. Popular web pages didn't immediately get 4x faster, because they had carefully avoided doing anything in JS if its performance mattered, but JS did. It's true that V8 used a ridiculous amount of RAM, and still does, but its existence made it possible to do things in JS that previously required native code.
As for Adobe, they never did much for JS; they tried to get people to use ActionScript instead, which was a statically-typed language with syntactic similarities to JS.
Apple built the Sunspider benchmarks in 2007, and along with Mozilla, they made dramatic real world performance improvements before Chrome was even publicly announced.
Macromedia (later Adobe) funded a whole bunch of JIT research as the Tamarin Tracing project, which was shared with Firefox as TraceMonkey. The NanoJIT assembly backend was actually shared code.
I guess you're right that TraceMonkey was announced before Chrome was released on 2007-09-02, one day after its inadvertent public announcement. TraceMonkey was announced, though incomplete, more than a week earlier, 2008-08-23: https://brendaneich.com/2008/08/tracemonkey-javascript-light.... SFX, however, was announced later, 2008-09-18.
I don't want to piss too much on SunSpider, but unsurprisingly V8 did better on V8’s benchmarks, while SFX and TM did better on SunSpider, once they were eventually released. That's because V8 was written to do well on its benchmarks, presumably, not because the benchmarks were rigged. Certainly they were in accordance with my experience at the time.
When Chrome was released, V8 was way ahead of the other browser JS engines at JS performance, partly because it had the first JS JIT. But the other browsers took a year or two to catch up, which they had because it also took websites a few years to move most of their functionality into browser JS.
I don't know why you keep emphasizing this “real-world” thing. Are you saying you think nbody and fannkuch are especially realistic benchmarks?
You're right though that Tamarin was a JS engine, not just an AS engine. We regret the error.
The point is Mozilla, Apple and Adobe did enormous work on JS before Chrome was released.
nbody and Fannkuch are meaningless for real world performance on a client side JS app. V8s benchmarks were widely considered to be unrepresentative of what browsers actually do. Sunspider and derivatives were the most realistic tests at the time and Chrome wasn’t a dramatic improvement.
Chrome’s marketing was incredibly successful in getting more people to use a browser better than IE but it didn’t have a dramatic improvement over FF or Safari.
> The point is Mozilla, Apple and Adobe did enormous work on JS before Chrome was released.
That's true relative to the work they had done on, for example, Gopher support, but it's not true relative to the work they did after Chrome was released. As I said, JS performance from 1995 to 2008 hadn't increased by even a factor of 4; then Chrome was released in 2008 and it immediately increased by a factor of 4, more than it had increased in the entire previous 13-year history of JS. It's true that there existed other optimization efforts. But they weren't successful, probably because not nearly enough effort was devoted to them. Tamarin Tracing/TraceMonkey was eventually discarded and is not part of SpiderMonkey today, although a different JIT strategy is. (LuaJIT uses the tracing-JIT strategy very successfully, though.)
> nbody and Fannkuch are meaningless for real world performance on a client side JS app. V8s benchmarks were widely considered to be unrepresentative of what browsers actually do. Sunspider and derivatives were the most realistic tests
I mentioned nbody and fannkuch because they are in SunSpider, so it seems that you are contradicting yourself in addition to, as demonstrated previously, mixing up the historical sequence of how things happened.
I had just written a parser generator and an experimental functional language that compiled to JS when Chrome came out, and the performance improvements I saw were in line with the Chrome benchmarks. My experience is not part of Google's marketing.
Safari perf had already improved more than 4x with the move from AST Interpretation to a register based bytecode VM with SquirrelFish. This happened before Chrome.
I’m working on a tracing JIT for Ruby at the moment partially inspired by LuaJIT. Fingers crossed it’ll be published research this year!
Right, but the Sunspider benchmark also tested strings, regex and date manipulation. V8s original benchmarks didn’t. Performance on stuff like a parser generator was way up, but it didn’t run jQuery based Ajax sites any faster.
JS is pretty much the fastest of the popular dynamic langs, if only because JS interpreters see highly-competitive investment from well-funded companies with armies of developers thanks to the web.
Like others have said, major Javascript engines are much than Ruby implementations, owing to the huge effort Firefox, Google, Apple, and Microsoft have put into those engines. In principle, I'm not sure if there's reasons that make one intrinsically harder to optimize.
But even if Javascript were slower, it wouldn't mean the prediction was right. Javascript didn't do something super amazing that let you write beautiful code (the way Rubyists feel about Ruby, or Python folks feel about Python). It just ran the web so we used it. Over time, it's morphed into a language that's about as expressive as any other good dynamic language, also with some warts. But it's not a leap ahead, which is what the original post predicted.
The only language I've felt that way about was Prolog. When it works right, it's amazing. Too bad I can rarely make that happen.
I am convinced there has to be a way to leverage the expressive power of a language like pure prolog without the strain of the 'hints' you need to give it when the depth-first algorithm can't solve the problem. My bet is that if the interpreter 'knows' enough algorithms to solve common calculations, it could leverage these to compute 90% of problems (without needing to have one algorithm for each problem). For the other 10% you would have to supply the interpreter with the necessary algorithms yourself.
JavaScript is now both faster and less productive than Ruby, so it doesn't match his prediction that a slower and more productive language will become popular.
Applications written in JavaScript tend to be hideously slow (and getting worse) but this is more of a community problem; the language itself is now rather fast by dynamic language standards.
Did anybody predict the slow death of jQuery or the rise of giant monster JavaScript frameworks? 2010 is when jQuery was a cult of personality. It was everywhere and any criticism of it was quickly met with desperate mob violence.
Did anybody predict a typical corporate web page would require 3gb of JavaScript code from frameworks and thousands of foreign packages just to write a couple of instructions to screen?
Sometimes fractured and all over the place is a sign of success. Python is used by a huge variety of different communities for a myriad of use cases, which is pulling it in different directions. That’s not a bad problem to have, as long as it’s managed well and the core webs seem very tuned in to this issue.
Also the community migration to Python 3 is done now. Yes there are massive P2 code bases out there still, but for new projects P3 has been the clear choice for a long time now. It’s over.
Raku (formerly Perl 6) basically sits alone as the successor to the slower-and-more-expressive throne. It's a great language to study for the gee-whiz-they-thought-of-everything factor.
But, nobody is paying attention to it. Some of that is because of the Perl 6 baggage, but just as much is probably because this past decade was so heavily entrenched in proliferation of the web-cloud-mobile paradigm that new scripting systems weren't part of the hype cycle. If it didn't get the backing of the FAANGs, it didn't register.
I can imagine a day coming where scripting shines again, though. It might actually be closer than we think. There is always a need for glue code, and glue code benefits from being a kitchen sink of built-in functionality.
We've reached a point where package ecosystem eclipses the importance of language features (which, in brand new languages, typically only offer incremental improvements these days).
It's not good enough to build a slightly better language any more. People won't learn a new language without their favourite packages (or equivalents).
Half of those predictions read like "the thing that is a trend now, will continue to be a trend".
I can be a prophet too - Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are not going to be displaced in the next decade.
> Half of those predictions read like "the thing that is a trend now, will continue to be a trend"
And yet, people regularly think "a decade is a long time, surely this trend will be finished by then". Recognizing that existing trends are still likely valid is worthwhile.
- As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time.
You could argue that it's JavaScript. JavaScript had terrible performance even in 2008, can't remember now what it was like by 2010, but I would guess V8 was still pretty lacklustre back then.
I read it such that if, for arguments's sake, Ruby is 10 times slower than Java that people would start using a new language that is 10 times slower than Ruby. I'm not sure that ever described Javascript, and it certainly didn't as the decade progressed with the advancements that have been made in executing it.
I feel like that one simply missed the mark. If anything, there was greater emphasis towards languages that were more performant, even if less productive for banging out a working product.
It definitely did. IE6's JavaScript was super slow. You cannot even imagine how slow it was if you never worked in it.
Remember, IE6 was the dominate browser for years, so very slow JavaScript was the norm.
For example round about 2008 I made a client-side pivot table for a web app, tried it in JavaScript first, even trivial tables would take 10 seconds despite all the optimization I tried (in IE6, IE7 + Firefox).
I rewrote it using XML + XSLT and it was instant. But it was truly gnarly code.
Maybe JavaScript libraries and frameworks? I haven't touched too many of the "batteries included" ones but I see them out of the corner of my eye at meetups and hackathons, they seem unwieldy enough to fit the bill.
The fact that in 2020 we still don't really have CPUs that are significantly faster than those released in the middle of the decade in terms of single threaded perf (which is still the paradigm that most programming languages today operate under for the most part) kind of put a nail in the coffin of that prediction.
I can totally picture new languages as described doing well today if we had exponentially more single threaded processing power/watt at our disposal than we actually do.
I think there is still opportunity for languages that offer huge leaps in expressiveness w.r.t handling concurrency even at the cost of raw single threaded performance. Though I would not label a language like that as "slower" as it'd allow us to actually make much better use of our computing resources than we reasonably could today without blowing through most of our complexity budget, resulting in faster programs in practice.
> - As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time.
Interesting how plausible this one is, yet turned out to be terribly wrong: the newer hyped languages that got some uptake were largely compiled ones like Swift, Rust, Kotlin, and Dart.
I mean, JavaScript and Python have definitely become much more popular for many more things than they were in 2010.
I doubt Swift replaced much besides other compiled languages, and Kotlin just compiles to Java anyway. Dart's VM idea was dropped so its small usage is largely compiling to JS still.
I would say that the overall idea of performance being traded for programmer time is definitely happening despite the emergence of Rust.
In terms of language design, it seems like swift and julia are the most forward looking.
I personally don't think swift will ever escape the Mac ecosystem, just like Objective-C never did, but something with the same DNA will.
In the same way that Objective-C and Ruby both implement the philosophy of Smalltalk, I think that philosophy has yet to be fleshed out in a simple syntax that is natively jit'ed/compiled.
> Dart's VM idea was dropped so its small usage is largely compiling to JS still.
Are you sure about this? I was under the impression that today's Flutter development is highly dependent on the niceties the Dart VM provides, and newer Dart releases improved upon them.
> I would say that the overall idea of performance being traded for programmer time is definitely happening despite the emergence of Rust.
In some sense Rust is in that same vain - reducing certain errors and the need for tools like Coverity, which in turn makes programmers more efficient.
Rust and Dart hasn’t seen that much “uptake” by the broader market, it’s hyped by geeks but that’s about it. Swift is becoming popular because if you want to develop for iOS, you don’t have a choice. Kotlin is getting some uptake.
Rust has seen lots of quiet uptake. What you don't see is hiring for people for Rust because most organizations don't experience a whole-sale shift to Rust, and you just retrain people on the inside.
I'd wager there are lots of people like me - writing small tools at work in Rust, but the employer would never hire for Rust.
I think we'll see broader market adoption in the next 2-5yrs though, in terms of people actually hiring Rust developers. There's still a little maturing to do in a couple areas to clean up some papercuts.
Disclaimer: I really like Rust am a little biased.
The not hiring but using bit is based on not seeing Rust jobs despite companies actively using Rust, and many anecdotes of "I wasn't hired for rust, but we use it" over in reddit on r/rust when people ask how to get a rust job.
One thing that always really bugged me about the "the language will figure it out" philosophy is the complete disregard towards carbon footprint.
Like yeah, you can make an interpreted dynamic language that's pretty neat, but you can also make something like go, swift, or Julia that jits and also captures 90% of that ease of use while significantly reducing your hosting costs/energy consumption.
Going forward I think static compiler inference will be the future of language design. Either for safety like in rust or for convenience like in swift.
And we can already see pitfalls in the interpreted world of python where the wrong implementation, like using a loop instead of numpy, can lead to devastating performance impacts. Looking forward, something like this seems as outdated as having to manage your 640k of executable space in DOS: an unreasonable design constraint caused by the legacy implications of the day.
My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy was cheap.
I'm actually pretty amazed at what the Javascript VM people have done in the past decade. It's way more than I ever expected.
As far as the carbon footprint, well, yeah, it depends. At Google I remember a friend talking about how he cringed whenever he added more code to the pipeline that ingests the entire internet. He said that he wondered how much extra carbon was release into the atmosphere just because of his stupid code.
As for numpy, we are seeing that loops are stupid and Iverson and APL were right. :-)
> At Google I remember a friend talking about how he cringed whenever he added more code to the pipeline that ingests the entire internet. He said that he wondered how much extra carbon was release into the atmosphere just because of his stupid code.
I wish companies were under more financial pressure to actually track and mitigate this. (hint hint, carbon taxes)
Not so sure our energy problems are going to come to a head in the form of all-out energy poverty. More likely I think: the convenience of energy being instantly available at all the right times and places will diminish.
Cloud spot pricing is I think one example where things that can be batched and deferred will be cheap even in a energy-decline future.
This is assuming we don’t sink so far as to lose our productive capacity for energy infrastructure altogether. Depends how bull/bear you are about the whole thing I suppose. In that scenario, there’s also gonna be no market to sell whatever you’re coding to.
I think the new languages are about developer productivity, but in a different way. It allows you to make more robust software via a better typing system, or more robust multithreading via rust's borrow system. In the past, our machines couldn't handle such strict languages as well because they have a high compile time cost.
In overall total effort needed to make something robust, something like rust will beat something like ruby, because the dynamic language-ists compensate via a larger test suite.
>My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy was cheap.
Funnily enough someone said that exact same thing 10 years ago in that thread:
>* Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses.
While pithy, that's not actually an interesting rebuttal.
You should elaborate, especially since "huge corporations", namely Apple, Google, and Mozilla (I guess?), are the ones pushing Swift, Go, and Rust, respectively.
Huge corporations always push for languages which are brain dead and make developers be as fungible as possible. Unfortunately not all software has been invented yet and writing in such a language is a nightmare.
So what happens is that people gravitate towards languages which are pleasant enough to work on to try new ideas in.
The progressing of bash -> awk -> perl -> python happened for a reason. Hell we're even seeing people use lisp like languages unironically for the first time in decades.
Enabling developers of different talents and backgrounds to be productive and contribute successfully, and to scale up in number of separate teams, is a hard problem and doesn't deserve the kind of dismissiveness you give it here.
More powerful languages enable talented developers to be more productive individually, but it's hard to teach all the other developers about the new and interesting abstractions that the powerful languages enable, and it's impossible to hire for them directly. This limits velocity.
And it's not just huge corporations, it's any company which is trying to scale from 10 to 100 developers; where you're hiring continuously, where there are too many other developers to efficiently rely on ambient learning.
Most setups and most hardware isn’t efficient enough for language to really matter. So the solution to carbon footprint isn’t to stop using python, it’s to stop burning coal.
The sad thing about Python is that it shouldn't need to be interpreted. People don't use it for that reason. Remove one or two obscure meta-programming features that nobody uses (or shouldn't be using) and you could in principle remove GIL and make it JIT just as good as Javascript.
JS really shows what's possible in this field with some benchmarks even outperforming c++. This space of expressive yet fast languages is a gap that remains to be filled and will probably be by 2030, sadly it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation because you don't only need a good syntax to become popular, also a healthy ecosystem around it. What we will see is probably not any new language but rather that existing languages from both sides of the spectrum converge more towards the middle ground.
It's also been quite a decade of growth for old stodgy languages. In 2010, it seemed like C++, Java, and Javascript were never going to change, but they've all significantly cleaned up their acts.
I think the prediction still had a kernel of truth to it though - every edge that chip manufacturers and JIT developers can give us has been burned away on slower and slower client-side rendering frameworks.
And PHP. PVP 5.3 was the newest version in 2010 and as the years wore on many thought HipHop by Facebook would start to take over for serious PHP applications. PHP 7 completely changed the course of the PHP community and took the air out of HHVM’s sails.
HipHop was a cross-compiler which facebook abandoned for HHVM, a rewrite of the PHP engine with faster internals. It always had compatibility issues, but the improved performance made it interesting (afaik nobody outside facebook really got that much into Hack the language). PHP7 was a rewrite of the internal data structures which put it on close enough performance footing. Because HHVM was never a drop-in replacement for PHP and moved further away over time the community ended up sticking with PHP7 and now pretty much only facebook uses HHVM, with the big players that moved to HHVM all transitioning back to PHP7.
Electron isn’t just JavaScript, else I would have said JavaScript. Electron is front and center in the movement to shorten development time by consuming more PC resources at runtime. I feel that’s the spirit of the prediction.
ryacko is perfectly clearly stating that Electron reduces the amount of training that developers need. This is different from making them develop faster. It just makes them more replaceable.
I have no idea how to parse twobat's question. The "or" is especially confusing. I'm not surprised that ryacko is baffled by it.
Electron gives you a UI and some standard library stuff. That's pretty obviously a totally separate issue from training an algorithm... I think? Am I missing something?
I still think asking "what or who?" with no other elaboration is really confusing. It's such a vague question that you have to guess how to answer, and it's super easy to answer it in a way that doesn't satisfy what the asker actually meant to ask.
Training for developers, presumably, especially web developers who want to build native apps. If retraining was free, Electron would have approximately no market.
I don't agree. I've implemented GUIs with raw Xlib, Tcl/Tk, Qt, GTK, MFC, SDL, XUL, and DHTML. Of all of these, DHTML is the most productive for me, and by a significant margin. The Tcl/Tk topic in Dercuano goes into those experiences in more detail, if you're interested.
Because it's not Moore's Law that matters here, but rather the subset that is the performance of single cores. And that subset stalled out pretty badly.
We're adding more and more cores, but more cores don't help you write a program in easy mode. Easy mode doesn't multithread.
I was thinking that exact same thing. Rails was hitting its peak in 2010, and the idea that programmer time is more valuable than CPU time suggested dynamic languages were the future.
I mean, that’s not entirely wrong — Besides JS, Python is arguably the most dominant language across all domains. Python is also faster than Ruby, though, and 3.x added static-like features to the language. It doesn’t seem like there’s much appetite for languages any slower than what we have now.
I wasn't trying to assert that ruby is faster, just trying to correct the notion that python is an inherently faster language than ruby.
If I look at a composite benchmark like debian's and don't see one leading by an order of magnitude, I file that away as "probably about the same speed, depends on your use case"
This is why I like to stick around HN and just read. The minds here seem to be much more brilliant compared to other parts of the web. That dude nailed it!
> - China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction. However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will increase.
The latter half of this one didn't come to be. Rule of law is weaker and civil liberties have declined.
Civil liberty and rule of law are orthogonal mostly. China has used a decade to make most court cases publicly accessible through internet, all corporation and their holding/debt status similarly accessible, a host of other governmental information available. While there are still a significant amount of corruption, the law enforcement would have been at most transparent in history. Civil Liberty is on a different track however, with laws obstructing such being enforced.
Most court cases yes, the ones that actually matter from a political and civil liberties perspective, no not at all. China is ruled by Xi Jinping and the Communist Party, not the law.
“China Must Never Adopt Constitutionalism, Separation of Powers, or Judicial Independence“ - Xi Jinping
According to the World Bank's metric, China's percentile ranking on rule of law improved somewhat from 2010 to 2018 (eyeballing the chart, looks like it moved from 40th to 48th). This is of course not quite the same thing as an absolute increase in rule of law; if rule of law is worsening everywhere, then the ranking change could still be a decrease (though globally worse rule of law isn't my impression).
If 6 out of 17 predictions correct with the only unambiguously correct predictions being trivial or vague is "nailing it," then I probably won't be taking stock advice from you any time soon. On the other hand, predicting the future is kind of hard. IsaacL made some really conservative predictions, sticking to things that seemed obvious. In fact, most of the wrong ones would be perfectly reasonable predictions for the next 10 years. It just goes to show how hard making predictions really is.
Below is how I calculated 6 out of 17 predictions correct
---
> Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some time in the next two years.
Correct
> Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company.
Correct (profitable since last year)
> Microsoft will .. have shrunk and may have evolved into a consultancy company on the lines of IBM
Wrong
> Internet Explorer will shrink, but won't go away
Correct? (debatable, since software never completely goes away, but MS is no longer developing it and Edge doesn't use the same rendering engine)
> Chrome OS or a similar operating system that relies on web access may grow extremely slowly at first, before rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments. It will be most successful in places like cities that grant free municipial wifi access.
Wrong
> Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.
This was already true in 2010, so it doesn't even count.
> For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.
Wrong.
> In addition, at least one of the 'big' startups of the second half of the decade will have been possible with 2009 technology. By this I mean that people will still be discovering new potential for browser-based web applications built with current client-side technologies, which will remain ubiquitous, although new alternatives will appear.
Correct, but the predication that there will be at least one new web-based startup is not very interesting.
> It will be an even better time to start a startup in 2020 than it is now. One of the key drivers of ease-of-starting-up-ness will not be new technology, but new platforms - like Facebook and viral marketing, but better; or that solve other problems like micropayments, customer development, retention, and so on.
Wrong.
> Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".
Wrong.
> As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time.
Wrong.
> Having said that, Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm. Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law.
Wrong, IMO (transistors are still on the curve, but the performance impact of adding more transistors doesn't matter the same way it used to; but he cited Moore's Law specifically, so he's wrong).
> An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhage...
that's a tech view only. Startup-ing is harder because incumbents in innovative business have built huge moats, in pharma, chemistry, web, mobile, etc. Big business are more ready to react to disrupting newcomers by pricing them out, lobbying for new rules, buying them out, etc. Incumbents are also reaching a global scale that generates in itself such an advantage...
> Now you “need” half of npm, react, backend, devops etc to get started.
Says who? You can literally spin up nearly any server computing infrastructure imaginable in a matter of seconds. Just because software is getting bloated under the covers, doesn't mean its any harder.
You can still take the 2010 approach and just run everything on Rails and Postgres. It’ll be a long time before any startup outgrows that stack, and by the time they do they’ll have the ability to rewrite like Twitter did.
Anyone who starts off with anything more than that (or Django or your favorite language’s equivalent) is just wasting time and effort trying to be trendy. Over-engineering a startup only serves to keep you from testing market fit, which is only a good plan if you’re trying to milk more investment money because you know you’re going to fail as soon as you launch.
> (ChromeOS will grow slowly, then rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments) Wrong.
I don't know about that. ChromeOS did grow slowly, and has gained significant share of the entire US education space (K-12). Yeah, it's a niche market. But I think that fits the for "certain market segments" qualifier.
> (Virtual worlds will remain niche, but WoW will pass 20 million users, a Facebook-like game or similar will pass 200 million users) Wrong.
This is technically wrong, but in-spirit correct. Virtual worlds / MMO games did get the traction claimed, just not WoW specifically. (The MMORPG FF14 Online has ~20 million users, MMO Warframe has 50 million registered users, 'facebook-game' Farmville has 73 million users, and 'or similar game' Fortnite has 250 million registered users). Minecraft holds similar numbers.
And while WoW itself never quite hit those numbers, a different game from the same studio did. Blizzard's Hearthstone has over 100 million registered users today.
>> Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.
> This was already true in 2010, so it doesn't even count.
This definitely wasn't true in 2010. On June 1, 2010, Steve Jobs proclaimed that the post-PC era had arrived, and was promptly ridiculed for it by the industry and media. Massive social changes caused by mobile phones have only occurred this decade, as the gig economy has exploded and places like India have 10x'd the number of citizens with internet access.
>> For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.
> Wrong.
Huh? Of those 4, Facebook in 2009 was the most valuable at $10 billion. Now there are 20+ private unicorns with that valuation, as well as dozens more that have IPOd in the last few years. How is that prediction wrong in any way, shape, or form?
>> Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".
> Wrong.
>> An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.
> Wrong.
Again, this is correct. The US did enter the Paris Agreement, and has not actually formally withdrawn yet as it is not legally eligible to do so until November 2020. "Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action." is an especially cogent prediction.
>> China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction. However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will increase. Internet crackdowns will continue, and may increase in severity, and will still be rationalized by porn.
> I want to say the civil liberties situation in China is the same, but I don't know enough about China to comment on it.
Civil liberties have likely gotten worse, but the rule of law has indeed strengthened. Internet crackdowns being rationalized by porn is also correct, as seen in the UK and elsewhere.
As far as ChromeOS and video games go, maxsilver covered those pretty well already.
> Now that Google is advertising Chrome on billboards here in the UK, all that can be safely predicted about the browser market is that it'll be extremely competitive.
It's rather interesting to see how the web went from IE dominating, to Chrome doing essentially the same. Looks like predicting such a growth was farfetched.
Funny to see that the prediction of IE sticking around was mostly right. I long for the day that IE11 will mostly be gone.
Internet Explorer 6 could have been the dominant browser essentially forever if Microsoft hadn’t zeroed its investment into it. Its incentives weren’t aligned with a robust web platform. Google’s incentives are definitely aligned for Chrome to dominate.
I remember Iran had very large scale protests in 2009 leading into 2010, so that was probably on their mind, thinking it would lead to some kind of radical change.
In my experience (very large contact center multinational), what killed IE6 in the enterprise was PCI and other security compliance standards. Large companies do whatever it takes to stay compliant to a lot of these standards because having that "stamp of approval" is the only way to keep other equally large companies as clients.
> if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how.
> Also, this decade sees the beginning of the "pension bomb" - the demographic bulge of post-war baby boomers crossing the threshold into retirement. It's fairly easy to predict that there will be pensions scandals, with some pensions companies going bust or paying out far less to recipients than had been originally advertised. Also I predict the beginning of large supermarket scale retirement homes/complexes/compounds, where economies of scale can reduce costs of elder care.
Both predictions were 100% correct. Many pensions were cut dramatically or eliminated. AMR is one that comes to mind immediately, but the pension benefit corp could only do so much for many others. Also, this problem now seems like an imminent problem for many companies and public entities. This is only going to get worse.
The Villages in Ocala, FL fit the second point, and I'm confident other places exist like it.
I think everyone likes to predict contrarian things which are actually unlikely to happen, in the hopes that they will be the only one who predicted it... just like investing/gambling
I'm going to go out on a limb and say 2035 at the earliest for full self-driving partly because A) software engineers never feeling quite done, B) the underlying software, firmware, and hardware won't be proveably safe enough and C) because something political will make self-driving EV's much more difficult.
The majority of programming today is not functional at all. I think Functional programming became sort of a tertiary elitist buzzword similar to drunken style kung fu. The effectiveness of the style is well known among practitioners and those that don't practice it look upon it as if it was a foreign and strange art.
What people don't realize is that functional programming is mixed martial arts. The art of combat brought down to the science of combat. I think there is little chance FP will become mainstream. MMA didn't become popular because it was the most effective art, it became popular because it was packaged up into entertainment.
> The majority of programming today is not functional at all.
That's probably true.
> I think there is little chance FP will become mainstream
That's demonstrably not, as React has basically gone full FP. I would argue that the majority of bootcamp students are now taught functional programming.
You could claim erlang isn't full fp because you have a stateful process attribute dictionary, and, while we're at it, access to network resources like a Postgres database, but that would be an almost meaningless statement.
With Hooks, react basically went full FP. You can still make an object component, but it is frowned upon.
nah not even going there. JS, is not functional therefore react is not functional. In all intermediary state in between interfaces to the framework you are allowed to have mutating state. So you actually have freedom to do any style in JS. I don't know react to well but I do know 100% that a function with this name is possible in react:
function closedFunctionThatdoesSomeImperativeAlgorithmWithMutatingInternalState(x: number): number
Right? This is totally legal and not even a niche use case so you can do whatever the hell you want in react. It's the interface to the framework that is supposedly FRP. This is NOT the case for most functional languages.
Also if you think all FP is just immutable state then you don't see the full picture. Immutable state creates an isomorphism between imperative programming and functional programming. Thus many bootcampers following the buzz end up just making all their variables immutable and thinking they figured it all out.
Yes, immutability forces the usage of higher order functions and recursion. This surface level knowledge also doesn't really provide any intrinsic benefit to programming. Recursion, map or reduce is not intrinsically better than a for loop or a while loop. Most of these beginners just subconsciously obey the buzz without ever realizing that that the buzz makes no sense. These guys don't even know what "function composition" means.
Because most of these programmers don't understand why FP is better, they don't use it properly and as a result this popularity of FP among react users is just a fad. Definitely not mainstream.
That's wrong. The "surface level knowledge" prevents huge classes of footguns, and that's why it's not just a fad. I can, have, and am about to take a junior and put them into prod without losing sleep far faster in FP land than I can in OO land. This is a real improvement that I as a developer who has complete ownership over a project care about.
You think OO patterns disappear in FP land? I can dependency inject my code to hell in FP just as fast as in OOP. I can pass first class functions around and effectively bring over all the problems from OOP land to FP.
It is a fad because FP issues new foot guns to blast your head completely off. FP without types and without understanding isn't a huge improvement over procedural programming or OOP.
You're already hearing about programmers not buying into the whole FP fad largely because of there experience with FP on react and other similar platforms.
They halfway did. Other languages took the interesting parts of functional languages (Java and C++ have lambdas, now). The the dynamic bit, Python has type annotations now, and Go, a replacement for Python in some ways, is statically typed.
Except for the spread of Javascript. No one said backend JS would be a thing.
by DrJokepu:
> Surprisingly enough, Apple will still stay relevant even though Steve Jobs will have to leave his position due to health problems or something else.
To me the interesting question is: What cool things were predicted and still don't exist, but could if someone from that thread had spent the past 10 years trying to make it happen?
Printing the keys and sticking them a safe would have done the trick - but you'd need the foresight to know that not touching it for 10 years is the plan.
That's the gotcha. If bitcoin hits $1M by 2030, the people reading your comment from the 2030 repost of this thread will have a good snicker.
Bitcoin's entire value, literally all of it, is just an index for how widely and strongly felt HODLology is across the globe. The sale of a bitcoin is a cult member leaving, the purchase is a baptism, however transiently intended the purchase is, because the purchase represents the new recruits own belief in HODLology.
Ok I make a prediction here for 2030: Bitcoin won't be at $1M at all, very far from it. Bitcoin will be between $0 and the cost of mining a single coin. Right now, this is around $7,000. Could be similar or less in 2030.
I don't expect it to go anywhere. It seems to have a niche purpose, but will never gain mass adoption.
I make another prediction: By 2030 not a single cryptocurrency will be used mainstream / have replaced fiat currency. The strongest will still be Bitcoin, but it'll be as weak or non-existent for normal people like it is now.
I predict that gaming could see a huge uptick in crypto-currency usage. Could you imagine a game like Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft utilizing a crypto-currency rather than an in-game artificial currency? You could create entire in-game economies with real life value. People could actually make a living by playing games full time as scary as that sounds.
Could you imagine the moral implications of someone robbing you of crypto-currency in a game like GTA or some survival game?
I just think there's some very creative use-cases for crypto-currency that will pop up over the next decade.
As for most proposed cryptocurrency use cases, it's unclear why your example couldn't just be a number in a database maintained by the game's producers.
BTW, people already do make real-world money grinding for WoW gold.
That is the wrong way around. The cost of mining a coin is influenced by it's market value, due to economics and the difficulty adjustments. If BTC becomes worthless, it won't cost anything to mine a coin.
Probably a good strategy is sell when you can retire off of it. Having $10m but not having gambled it for $1bn isn't a loosing position to be in, IMO. Alternatively you could have 4 allocations, sell one in 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050. Or 10 going over the next 100 years (pass them down to kids).
Or they sold it all in the 2013 bubble and now regret it.
(This happened to a friend of mine - he sold it all off to pay-off his student loans before the 2013 bubble peaked - it'd be worth over $10m at the end of 2017).
If you still have the old machine, it's not impossible that the deleted wallet is still on the disk and could be recovered using some sort of undelete tool.
I had something like 20 coins, but it was on a secondary computer that didn’t have backups and was long since recycled. You can believe I spent a few hours digging through all my backups to find the wallet back in 2017... ah well.
Or they did what I did - spent it. At the peak I would have had $8 million before taxes had I not turned it into cash to pay for the electricity my CPU was burning to mine it.
Oh well. Good thing I actually enjoy my current job.
and no one really knew about it until it made slashdot on 7-11-2010. Mtgox started trading in 7/2010 and I think I bought my first bitcoin around 5/2011 for $10/each or around there.
> if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how.
-- jacquesm
Roadster was an extremely niche car for millionaires. Spacex had yet to have a successful launch I believe. So while not a crazy prediction, still impressive that I doubt many people who have bet on
Model S got unveiled on 2009, the Gov invested/lent in them in 2009 and I remember the whole buzz of having a Tesla. Seems like a lot of people betted on them (pre-orders, government, investors, etc).
> Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.
That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
> Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.
Who's scalp was it? I don't know any politician who has been taken to task over network analysis and data mining. Fore sure not Obama, whose staffers have quietly chortled that they did far worse than Cambridge Analytica ever did. Definitely not Trump, his numbers are as even as they haev ever been. Maybe Zuckerberg? But he's still CEO of his company.
I believe the "taking the scalp" could also be a reference for its intended offensive power, not just the scandal of using it.
In that light, the answer is obvious: Hillary Clinton!
(And before someone complaints, which someone will definitely still do: Given the extremely close election, it is possible, even likely, that any single one of maybe a dozen issues had the potential to change the outcome: Just being a bit better as a candidate would have been enough. That e-mail "scandal" getting the same attention as the dozens of carbon copies of it since revealed in the Trump Cabinet, i. e. none, would have sufficed. Defences against Russian interference, or even just widespread knowledge of the attacks, could have been enough etc. etc.
To me it seems obvious that Hillary Clinton was the one who pulled (or pushed) the victory in Trumps direction, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by some really interesting remarks about her core voters.
(Disclaimer: Not an American, don't like Hillary Clinton and definitely not Donald Trump.)
I can see how one would get that impression based on our media, but it would be an oversimplification to say the least. The history of Hillary Clinton is too complex and long to get into for the purposes of this discussion.
Suffice to say the Trump campaign made a concerted effort to use data to target ads at specific groups in the Rust Belt with the intention of de-legitimizing her as a Presidential candidate.
I would say is held up until 2016. After the election of Trump and the ensuing Russophobia, mainstream liberals became allied with the security state (CIA, NSA, FBI), and quickly turned on former liberal heroes like Snowden, Assange, Manning etc.
Is the politics of information a liberal issue? Other than their complaints about Russia, it doesn't seem like there's many speaking out against the inordinate political power wielded by information overlords like Facebook and Google
I feel that overall much didn't change in the past decade in the tech world. Bitcoin is a great example of that, there was a big bubble where you could raise money just by mentioning Blockchain, and then just as quickly it faded away. AI isn't much different at the moment, it feels much more like a marketing buzzword than something that has changed my life.
Compare this to developments happening outside the computing-tech world (like Musk is doing) and the rise of green building tech. Today it is more than feasible to build a house that generates more energy than it consumes over the course of a year, even in cold climates like Northern Europe. The only thing preventing this from being more common is knowledge (builders keep building what they know) and it costs a little more upfront.
461 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] thread>adw on Jan 1, 2010 [-]
>Network analysis and data mining will claim their first major political scalp.
>That'll be a watershed moment: the politics of information are going to start being the kind of core liberal issue that environmental issues currently are.
> I predict (and hope for) a major turn back to simplicity in technologies. Multimillion-line software will go extinct like dinosaurs. Existing programming languages and platforms will gradually be replaced with ones so simple and elegant that one software component will be written and maintained by one to three developers and art designers and not a whole software company packed with managers and other unnecessary staff. Oh, and managers along with poeple who "understand" "software business" but not software will hopefully go extinct too.
If I can predict anything for 2030 based on this, it will be software being even more complex, with even more frameworks and abstractions.
Performance comes from optimizing the usage of state against hardware, modularity comes from code satisfying the properties of composition which is best left stateless (and high levels of modularity must come from abstraction and conventional practice, incurring further debts on the programmer and machine.)
It's a tension that I haven't seen fully resolved but I'm very very very open to being wrong. Many languages seem to be experimenting in this space with some preference for one side of the equation for another.
We know how this works, at least in broad theoretical terms. Zero-cost abstractions are quite feasible within a self-contained module/component, but their scope is ultimately limited by ease of building and deployment. Nevertheless the performance impact of having to support high levels of abstraction across modules/components is quite reasonable, even if not literally "zero" cost.
Some have noted that JIT systems perform many of the same things as supercompilation, and it seems reasonable to consider that JIT is part of the equation for optimising performance when systems are pushed to production. We've been doing that for decades now, with increasing sophistication in the details. Profile driven, multiple stages of specialisation and optimisation.
Not quite to the levels of proof systems (and therefore supercompilation as envisioned) yet - there's plenty of room to get better at it - and we need to go there if we want those "zero cost abstractions" across modules that aren't designed for it, often with significant impedance mismatches.
We could use a lot more of it in software.
Nothing can fix unnecessary complexity. It will continue to affect every tool used to maintain it.
What I never predicted was the sheer enormity of the useless cruft the community would build around it. I used to contribute to some of the React community places (particularly irc), and in the early days the discussion there was super interesting. Now it's just endless waves of "I'm building X and having Y problem with dependency Z" where Z is something I've never used because it looks shit, Y is something I haven't encountered in 3 years, and X is something I could build in my sleep with just plain old React.
I've always wondered if Java devs feel the same, or if they're happy drowning in whatever crap is in their ecosystem? Like, do they all love Java but hate every single code base they have to work on? Or is that a uniquely JS problem?
npm and is_odd comes to mind.
There surely is a lot of frameworks, it almost make more sense to have less.
Except for C and C++. C just gets better, C++ just keeps growing.
The Bell System was obligated to license all its patents royalty free, and it was barred from entering any industry other than telecommunications.
...
Although the 1956 consent decree was not effective in ending market foreclosure, it permanently increased the scale of US innovation.
https://voxeu.org/article/how-antitrust-enforcement-can-spur...
Its probably because they picked the right guy to lead after Ballmer.
Ballmer: Called Linux "Cancer". Literally.
Satya: "We are all in on open-source"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093
And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025787
"not [electronically] tracking your kids will be considered somewhat negligent"
i dunno, seems negligent to me
My favorite is the joke that Zuck will buy Portugal.
As in the saying. Hindsight is 20/20.
Nadella’s excellent pivoting of MS into a cloud and services focused company saved Microsoft from a stagnant or declining state.
I think this basically describes AI.
> "various 'experts' on it will spring from nowhere to lecture us all about it"
It replaces trust with massive resource consumption and doesn't do a good job of being digital money (it is hard to use safely, it is hard to use anonymously).
What is groundbreaking is the concept of P2P value exchange. And that's what bitcoin really is, still a young PoC that will surely evolve or get superseded by a 2.0 tech.
The genie is out of the bottle....
Edit: spelling
The fall and return of the cat picture still amuses me. In the early days of Web adoption when people would put up a personal home page just for the thrill of having one, stereotypically the only bits of content they would be able to come up with for it were a list of favourite bands and one or more scanned-in pictures of their cat. So for years and years afterwards cat pictures were a synechdote, a punchline for jokes about the naïvety of the early Web. Then phone cameras and low-effort social media became big, and ...
Chrome and V8 were released in 2008, and Node.js (which leverages V8) in 2009. V8 was already considered fast back then. Mozilla and Apple also focused on optimizing their JS stack in the following years.
[1] I'm not a fan of linking to benchmarks, but that's the best I can do: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... / https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
As for Adobe, they never did much for JS; they tried to get people to use ActionScript instead, which was a statically-typed language with syntactic similarities to JS.
https://webkit.org/blog/152/announcing-sunspider-09/ https://webkit.org/blog/214/introducing-squirrelfish-extreme...
Chrome + V8 was already behind in real world performance, not ahead!
http://www.satine.org/archives/2008/09/19/squirrelfish-extre...
Macromedia (later Adobe) funded a whole bunch of JIT research as the Tamarin Tracing project, which was shared with Firefox as TraceMonkey. The NanoJIT assembly backend was actually shared code.
I don't want to piss too much on SunSpider, but unsurprisingly V8 did better on V8’s benchmarks, while SFX and TM did better on SunSpider, once they were eventually released. That's because V8 was written to do well on its benchmarks, presumably, not because the benchmarks were rigged. Certainly they were in accordance with my experience at the time.
When Chrome was released, V8 was way ahead of the other browser JS engines at JS performance, partly because it had the first JS JIT. But the other browsers took a year or two to catch up, which they had because it also took websites a few years to move most of their functionality into browser JS.
I don't know why you keep emphasizing this “real-world” thing. Are you saying you think nbody and fannkuch are especially realistic benchmarks?
You're right though that Tamarin was a JS engine, not just an AS engine. We regret the error.
nbody and Fannkuch are meaningless for real world performance on a client side JS app. V8s benchmarks were widely considered to be unrepresentative of what browsers actually do. Sunspider and derivatives were the most realistic tests at the time and Chrome wasn’t a dramatic improvement.
https://johnresig.com/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/
Chrome’s marketing was incredibly successful in getting more people to use a browser better than IE but it didn’t have a dramatic improvement over FF or Safari.
That's true relative to the work they had done on, for example, Gopher support, but it's not true relative to the work they did after Chrome was released. As I said, JS performance from 1995 to 2008 hadn't increased by even a factor of 4; then Chrome was released in 2008 and it immediately increased by a factor of 4, more than it had increased in the entire previous 13-year history of JS. It's true that there existed other optimization efforts. But they weren't successful, probably because not nearly enough effort was devoted to them. Tamarin Tracing/TraceMonkey was eventually discarded and is not part of SpiderMonkey today, although a different JIT strategy is. (LuaJIT uses the tracing-JIT strategy very successfully, though.)
> nbody and Fannkuch are meaningless for real world performance on a client side JS app. V8s benchmarks were widely considered to be unrepresentative of what browsers actually do. Sunspider and derivatives were the most realistic tests
I mentioned nbody and fannkuch because they are in SunSpider, so it seems that you are contradicting yourself in addition to, as demonstrated previously, mixing up the historical sequence of how things happened.
I had just written a parser generator and an experimental functional language that compiled to JS when Chrome came out, and the performance improvements I saw were in line with the Chrome benchmarks. My experience is not part of Google's marketing.
I’m working on a tracing JIT for Ruby at the moment partially inspired by LuaJIT. Fingers crossed it’ll be published research this year!
Right, but the Sunspider benchmark also tested strings, regex and date manipulation. V8s original benchmarks didn’t. Performance on stuff like a parser generator was way up, but it didn’t run jQuery based Ajax sites any faster.
This should read, "before Chrome was released on 2008-09-02".
10x JavaScript V8 211.76 secs
100x Ruby 1.9 #2 34 min
106x JavaScript TraceMonkey 36 min
http://web.archive.org/web/20090705014239/http://shootout.al...
But even if Javascript were slower, it wouldn't mean the prediction was right. Javascript didn't do something super amazing that let you write beautiful code (the way Rubyists feel about Ruby, or Python folks feel about Python). It just ran the web so we used it. Over time, it's morphed into a language that's about as expressive as any other good dynamic language, also with some warts. But it's not a leap ahead, which is what the original post predicted.
The only language I've felt that way about was Prolog. When it works right, it's amazing. Too bad I can rarely make that happen.
Did anybody predict a typical corporate web page would require 3gb of JavaScript code from frameworks and thousands of foreign packages just to write a couple of instructions to screen?
I sense a strong convergence between all of them (builtin DS, linguistic traits, bits of static typing)
Also the community migration to Python 3 is done now. Yes there are massive P2 code bases out there still, but for new projects P3 has been the clear choice for a long time now. It’s over.
But, nobody is paying attention to it. Some of that is because of the Perl 6 baggage, but just as much is probably because this past decade was so heavily entrenched in proliferation of the web-cloud-mobile paradigm that new scripting systems weren't part of the hype cycle. If it didn't get the backing of the FAANGs, it didn't register.
I can imagine a day coming where scripting shines again, though. It might actually be closer than we think. There is always a need for glue code, and glue code benefits from being a kitchen sink of built-in functionality.
It's not good enough to build a slightly better language any more. People won't learn a new language without their favourite packages (or equivalents).
And yet, people regularly think "a decade is a long time, surely this trend will be finished by then". Recognizing that existing trends are still likely valid is worthwhile.
I dont think this happened?
I feel like that one simply missed the mark. If anything, there was greater emphasis towards languages that were more performant, even if less productive for banging out a working product.
Remember, IE6 was the dominate browser for years, so very slow JavaScript was the norm.
For example round about 2008 I made a client-side pivot table for a web app, tried it in JavaScript first, even trivial tables would take 10 seconds despite all the optimization I tried (in IE6, IE7 + Firefox).
I rewrote it using XML + XSLT and it was instant. But it was truly gnarly code.
I can totally picture new languages as described doing well today if we had exponentially more single threaded processing power/watt at our disposal than we actually do.
I think there is still opportunity for languages that offer huge leaps in expressiveness w.r.t handling concurrency even at the cost of raw single threaded performance. Though I would not label a language like that as "slower" as it'd allow us to actually make much better use of our computing resources than we reasonably could today without blowing through most of our complexity budget, resulting in faster programs in practice.
Interesting how plausible this one is, yet turned out to be terribly wrong: the newer hyped languages that got some uptake were largely compiled ones like Swift, Rust, Kotlin, and Dart.
I doubt Swift replaced much besides other compiled languages, and Kotlin just compiles to Java anyway. Dart's VM idea was dropped so its small usage is largely compiling to JS still.
I would say that the overall idea of performance being traded for programmer time is definitely happening despite the emergence of Rust.
I personally don't think swift will ever escape the Mac ecosystem, just like Objective-C never did, but something with the same DNA will.
In the same way that Objective-C and Ruby both implement the philosophy of Smalltalk, I think that philosophy has yet to be fleshed out in a simple syntax that is natively jit'ed/compiled.
The same goes for julia as an answer to R/pandas.
Are you sure about this? I was under the impression that today's Flutter development is highly dependent on the niceties the Dart VM provides, and newer Dart releases improved upon them.
In some sense Rust is in that same vain - reducing certain errors and the need for tools like Coverity, which in turn makes programmers more efficient.
I'd wager there are lots of people like me - writing small tools at work in Rust, but the employer would never hire for Rust.
I think we'll see broader market adoption in the next 2-5yrs though, in terms of people actually hiring Rust developers. There's still a little maturing to do in a couple areas to clean up some papercuts.
Disclaimer: I really like Rust am a little biased.
The not hiring but using bit is based on not seeing Rust jobs despite companies actively using Rust, and many anecdotes of "I wasn't hired for rust, but we use it" over in reddit on r/rust when people ask how to get a rust job.
Like yeah, you can make an interpreted dynamic language that's pretty neat, but you can also make something like go, swift, or Julia that jits and also captures 90% of that ease of use while significantly reducing your hosting costs/energy consumption.
Going forward I think static compiler inference will be the future of language design. Either for safety like in rust or for convenience like in swift.
And we can already see pitfalls in the interpreted world of python where the wrong implementation, like using a loop instead of numpy, can lead to devastating performance impacts. Looking forward, something like this seems as outdated as having to manage your 640k of executable space in DOS: an unreasonable design constraint caused by the legacy implications of the day.
My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy was cheap.
As far as the carbon footprint, well, yeah, it depends. At Google I remember a friend talking about how he cringed whenever he added more code to the pipeline that ingests the entire internet. He said that he wondered how much extra carbon was release into the atmosphere just because of his stupid code.
As for numpy, we are seeing that loops are stupid and Iverson and APL were right. :-)
I wish companies were under more financial pressure to actually track and mitigate this. (hint hint, carbon taxes)
Cloud spot pricing is I think one example where things that can be batched and deferred will be cheap even in a energy-decline future.
This is assuming we don’t sink so far as to lose our productive capacity for energy infrastructure altogether. Depends how bull/bear you are about the whole thing I suppose. In that scenario, there’s also gonna be no market to sell whatever you’re coding to.
In overall total effort needed to make something robust, something like rust will beat something like ruby, because the dynamic language-ists compensate via a larger test suite.
Funnily enough someone said that exact same thing 10 years ago in that thread:
>* Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. People still using them will be judged as incompetent programmers by the people who moved on to the new fashionable programming paradigm(s). At the same time, huge corporations will embrace functional programming / dynamic languages and third world universities will start focusing on them in their courses.
Wrong then wrong now.
While pithy, that's not actually an interesting rebuttal.
You should elaborate, especially since "huge corporations", namely Apple, Google, and Mozilla (I guess?), are the ones pushing Swift, Go, and Rust, respectively.
So what happens is that people gravitate towards languages which are pleasant enough to work on to try new ideas in.
The progressing of bash -> awk -> perl -> python happened for a reason. Hell we're even seeing people use lisp like languages unironically for the first time in decades.
More powerful languages enable talented developers to be more productive individually, but it's hard to teach all the other developers about the new and interesting abstractions that the powerful languages enable, and it's impossible to hire for them directly. This limits velocity.
And it's not just huge corporations, it's any company which is trying to scale from 10 to 100 developers; where you're hiring continuously, where there are too many other developers to efficiently rely on ambient learning.
JS really shows what's possible in this field with some benchmarks even outperforming c++. This space of expressive yet fast languages is a gap that remains to be filled and will probably be by 2030, sadly it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation because you don't only need a good syntax to become popular, also a healthy ecosystem around it. What we will see is probably not any new language but rather that existing languages from both sides of the spectrum converge more towards the middle ground.
I think the prediction still had a kernel of truth to it though - every edge that chip manufacturers and JIT developers can give us has been burned away on slower and slower client-side rendering frameworks.
I was always curious what happened to HipHop. Didn’t it become a part of Facebook’s custom flavor of PHP? (Forgot it’s name)
ryacko is perfectly clearly stating that Electron reduces the amount of training that developers need. This is different from making them develop faster. It just makes them more replaceable.
I have no idea how to parse twobat's question. The "or" is especially confusing. I'm not surprised that ryacko is baffled by it.
Hence the training for "what" or for "who" not being immediately parseable.
Until @ryacko said "Whom do you think I'm talking about?", I wasn't sure either.
I still think asking "what or who?" with no other elaboration is really confusing. It's such a vague question that you have to guess how to answer, and it's super easy to answer it in a way that doesn't satisfy what the asker actually meant to ask.
We're adding more and more cores, but more cores don't help you write a program in easy mode. Easy mode doesn't multithread.
I mean, that’s not entirely wrong — Besides JS, Python is arguably the most dominant language across all domains. Python is also faster than Ruby, though, and 3.x added static-like features to the language. It doesn’t seem like there’s much appetite for languages any slower than what we have now.
I think the perception is there because of python’s scientific and ML libraries that have a lot of c bindings, perhaps?
Both are drastically faster than they were a decade ago, so 2010-era python or ruby are still the high-water mark.
fwiw
That isn't something which can be checked, just stuff someone said.
If I look at a composite benchmark like debian's and don't see one leading by an order of magnitude, I file that away as "probably about the same speed, depends on your use case"
and golang (Go)
The latter half of this one didn't come to be. Rule of law is weaker and civil liberties have declined.
“China Must Never Adopt Constitutionalism, Separation of Powers, or Judicial Independence“ - Xi Jinping
https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/Home/Reports
Below is how I calculated 6 out of 17 predictions correct
---
> Facebook will not be displaced by another social network. It will IPO some time in the next two years.
Correct
> Twitter will become profitable, but not as much as some expect. It will be less profitable than Facebook, and may sell to another company.
Correct (profitable since last year)
> Microsoft will .. have shrunk and may have evolved into a consultancy company on the lines of IBM
Wrong
> Internet Explorer will shrink, but won't go away
Correct? (debatable, since software never completely goes away, but MS is no longer developing it and Edge doesn't use the same rendering engine)
> Chrome OS or a similar operating system that relies on web access may grow extremely slowly at first, before rapidly gaining share amongst certain market segments. It will be most successful in places like cities that grant free municipial wifi access.
Wrong
> Mobile phones won't replace computers, but increasing penetration amongst the poorest in developing countries, and increasingly capable handsets in developed countries (and developing countries) will make them a colossal juggernaut. Many of the really big changes, especially social changes, will be caused by mobiles.
This was already true in 2010, so it doesn't even count.
> For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.
Wrong.
> In addition, at least one of the 'big' startups of the second half of the decade will have been possible with 2009 technology. By this I mean that people will still be discovering new potential for browser-based web applications built with current client-side technologies, which will remain ubiquitous, although new alternatives will appear.
Correct, but the predication that there will be at least one new web-based startup is not very interesting.
> It will be an even better time to start a startup in 2020 than it is now. One of the key drivers of ease-of-starting-up-ness will not be new technology, but new platforms - like Facebook and viral marketing, but better; or that solve other problems like micropayments, customer development, retention, and so on.
Wrong.
> Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".
Wrong.
> As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time.
Wrong.
> Having said that, Moore's law will at least hiccup and may stop altogether in the middle of the decade, as semiconductor feature widths drop below 11nm. Since this will likely encourage investment in quantum computing and nanotechnology, by 2020 we might be seeing something faster than Moore's Law.
Wrong, IMO (transistors are still on the curve, but the performance impact of adding more transistors doesn't matter the same way it used to; but he cited Moore's Law specifically, so he's wrong).
> An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhage...
Facebook was started as a silly php script. Now you “need” half of npm, react, backend, devops etc to get started.
Says who? You can literally spin up nearly any server computing infrastructure imaginable in a matter of seconds. Just because software is getting bloated under the covers, doesn't mean its any harder.
Anyone who starts off with anything more than that (or Django or your favorite language’s equivalent) is just wasting time and effort trying to be trendy. Over-engineering a startup only serves to keep you from testing market fit, which is only a good plan if you’re trying to milk more investment money because you know you’re going to fail as soon as you launch.
I don't know about that. ChromeOS did grow slowly, and has gained significant share of the entire US education space (K-12). Yeah, it's a niche market. But I think that fits the for "certain market segments" qualifier.
> (Virtual worlds will remain niche, but WoW will pass 20 million users, a Facebook-like game or similar will pass 200 million users) Wrong.
This is technically wrong, but in-spirit correct. Virtual worlds / MMO games did get the traction claimed, just not WoW specifically. (The MMORPG FF14 Online has ~20 million users, MMO Warframe has 50 million registered users, 'facebook-game' Farmville has 73 million users, and 'or similar game' Fortnite has 250 million registered users). Minecraft holds similar numbers.
And while WoW itself never quite hit those numbers, a different game from the same studio did. Blizzard's Hearthstone has over 100 million registered users today.
> This was already true in 2010, so it doesn't even count.
This definitely wasn't true in 2010. On June 1, 2010, Steve Jobs proclaimed that the post-PC era had arrived, and was promptly ridiculed for it by the industry and media. Massive social changes caused by mobile phones have only occurred this decade, as the gig economy has exploded and places like India have 10x'd the number of citizens with internet access.
>> For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.
> Wrong.
Huh? Of those 4, Facebook in 2009 was the most valuable at $10 billion. Now there are 20+ private unicorns with that valuation, as well as dozens more that have IPOd in the last few years. How is that prediction wrong in any way, shape, or form?
>> Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".
> Wrong.
>> An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.
> Wrong.
Again, this is correct. The US did enter the Paris Agreement, and has not actually formally withdrawn yet as it is not legally eligible to do so until November 2020. "Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action." is an especially cogent prediction.
>> China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction. However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will increase. Internet crackdowns will continue, and may increase in severity, and will still be rationalized by porn.
> I want to say the civil liberties situation in China is the same, but I don't know enough about China to comment on it.
Civil liberties have likely gotten worse, but the rule of law has indeed strengthened. Internet crackdowns being rationalized by porn is also correct, as seen in the UK and elsewhere.
As far as ChromeOS and video games go, maxsilver covered those pretty well already.
It's rather interesting to see how the web went from IE dominating, to Chrome doing essentially the same. Looks like predicting such a growth was farfetched.
Funny to see that the prediction of IE sticking around was mostly right. I long for the day that IE11 will mostly be gone.
Curious if the "wisdom of crowds" works with these future predictions or if only a few were on target.
Turns out the “killer enterprise web application” was YouTube :)
https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
> if there is a way to work Elon Musk in there somewhere that would be good, I have a feeling he's going to make some big waves in the next 10 years but I haven't a clue how.
This is wrong too.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278
> Also, this decade sees the beginning of the "pension bomb" - the demographic bulge of post-war baby boomers crossing the threshold into retirement. It's fairly easy to predict that there will be pensions scandals, with some pensions companies going bust or paying out far less to recipients than had been originally advertised. Also I predict the beginning of large supermarket scale retirement homes/complexes/compounds, where economies of scale can reduce costs of elder care.
Both predictions were 100% correct. Many pensions were cut dramatically or eliminated. AMR is one that comes to mind immediately, but the pension benefit corp could only do so much for many others. Also, this problem now seems like an imminent problem for many companies and public entities. This is only going to get worse.
The Villages in Ocala, FL fit the second point, and I'm confident other places exist like it.
My guess is full self driving on high ways by 2030 with some semi-autonomous trucks. Removing a driver won’t happen until 2040-50.
Glad this didn't happen. Also it's weird to me to equate functional & dynamic like that.
What people don't realize is that functional programming is mixed martial arts. The art of combat brought down to the science of combat. I think there is little chance FP will become mainstream. MMA didn't become popular because it was the most effective art, it became popular because it was packaged up into entertainment.
That's probably true.
> I think there is little chance FP will become mainstream
That's demonstrably not, as React has basically gone full FP. I would argue that the majority of bootcamp students are now taught functional programming.
You could claim erlang isn't full fp because you have a stateful process attribute dictionary, and, while we're at it, access to network resources like a Postgres database, but that would be an almost meaningless statement.
With Hooks, react basically went full FP. You can still make an object component, but it is frowned upon.
Also if you think all FP is just immutable state then you don't see the full picture. Immutable state creates an isomorphism between imperative programming and functional programming. Thus many bootcampers following the buzz end up just making all their variables immutable and thinking they figured it all out.
Yes, immutability forces the usage of higher order functions and recursion. This surface level knowledge also doesn't really provide any intrinsic benefit to programming. Recursion, map or reduce is not intrinsically better than a for loop or a while loop. Most of these beginners just subconsciously obey the buzz without ever realizing that that the buzz makes no sense. These guys don't even know what "function composition" means.
Because most of these programmers don't understand why FP is better, they don't use it properly and as a result this popularity of FP among react users is just a fad. Definitely not mainstream.
It is a fad because FP issues new foot guns to blast your head completely off. FP without types and without understanding isn't a huge improvement over procedural programming or OOP.
You're already hearing about programmers not buying into the whole FP fad largely because of there experience with FP on react and other similar platforms.
Except for the spread of Javascript. No one said backend JS would be a thing.
Sad, but accurate.
I checked and nobody predicted a Trump presidency in 2010. So no time travelers amongst us sadly.
Bitcoin is like fairy dust , nearly impossible to grasp.
Bitcoin's entire value, literally all of it, is just an index for how widely and strongly felt HODLology is across the globe. The sale of a bitcoin is a cult member leaving, the purchase is a baptism, however transiently intended the purchase is, because the purchase represents the new recruits own belief in HODLology.
I don't expect it to go anywhere. It seems to have a niche purpose, but will never gain mass adoption.
I make another prediction: By 2030 not a single cryptocurrency will be used mainstream / have replaced fiat currency. The strongest will still be Bitcoin, but it'll be as weak or non-existent for normal people like it is now.
I predict that gaming could see a huge uptick in crypto-currency usage. Could you imagine a game like Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft utilizing a crypto-currency rather than an in-game artificial currency? You could create entire in-game economies with real life value. People could actually make a living by playing games full time as scary as that sounds.
Could you imagine the moral implications of someone robbing you of crypto-currency in a game like GTA or some survival game?
I just think there's some very creative use-cases for crypto-currency that will pop up over the next decade.
BTW, people already do make real-world money grinding for WoW gold.
(This happened to a friend of mine - he sold it all off to pay-off his student loans before the 2013 bubble peaked - it'd be worth over $10m at the end of 2017).
I though 'oh I'll just mine a few more next week' when I get my new laptop (!!! mining on cpu).
Narrator: He forgot about it.
Oh well. Good thing I actually enjoy my current job.
A few of them are correct (cheapish high density displays, commercially successful ebook readers, self-driving cars) but most are terribly inaccurate.
Left the same comment but with some fun, probably wrong predictions, over on the other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941512.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025811
Quick search result in that time frame https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1...
That one strikes a certain chord..
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025703
This poster saw it.
If anything, this has come much more true than I anticipated. I hadn’t got as far as Cambridge Analytica.
Who's scalp was it? I don't know any politician who has been taken to task over network analysis and data mining. Fore sure not Obama, whose staffers have quietly chortled that they did far worse than Cambridge Analytica ever did. Definitely not Trump, his numbers are as even as they haev ever been. Maybe Zuckerberg? But he's still CEO of his company.
In that light, the answer is obvious: Hillary Clinton!
(And before someone complaints, which someone will definitely still do: Given the extremely close election, it is possible, even likely, that any single one of maybe a dozen issues had the potential to change the outcome: Just being a bit better as a candidate would have been enough. That e-mail "scandal" getting the same attention as the dozens of carbon copies of it since revealed in the Trump Cabinet, i. e. none, would have sufficed. Defences against Russian interference, or even just widespread knowledge of the attacks, could have been enough etc. etc.
(Disclaimer: Not an American, don't like Hillary Clinton and definitely not Donald Trump.)
Suffice to say the Trump campaign made a concerted effort to use data to target ads at specific groups in the Rust Belt with the intention of de-legitimizing her as a Presidential candidate.
ctrl+f "bitcoin" returns 0 results.
Disruptive ideas take humanity by a storm few people believe it's coming, the rest can only connect the dots looking backwards.
Compare this to developments happening outside the computing-tech world (like Musk is doing) and the rise of green building tech. Today it is more than feasible to build a house that generates more energy than it consumes over the course of a year, even in cold climates like Northern Europe. The only thing preventing this from being more common is knowledge (builders keep building what they know) and it costs a little more upfront.
http://nautil.us/issue/65/in-plain-sight/why-futurism-has-a-...
it has something special somehow, I always come back to it
If you want to make a new prediction, a new thread has gotten started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21941278.