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Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

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Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#311

Post by lizmat »

buzzkillington wrote: post #264
CoolGuySteve wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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 se…

Maybe the progression is actually bash -> awk -> perl -> python -> raku ? One can wish :-)

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#312

Post by rsynnott »

mminer237 wrote: post #73
TulliusCicero wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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 eme…

Those are both typically faster than Ruby, tho. Ruby (especially pre-1.9) probably does represent the mainstream peak for tolerance of slowness.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#313

Post by rsynnott »

darzu wrote: post #23
haunter wrote: post #5

IsaacL nailed it the best https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093 And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D

> - 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 think this basically describes AI.

Doesn’t really qualify as unknown and unpredictable. We’re in about the third AI bubble right now, and I doubt it’ll be the last.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#314

Post by rsynnott »

wycy wrote: post #43
hyperpape wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#317

Post by danso »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #54
haunter wrote: post #5

IsaacL nailed it the best https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093 And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D

> - 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 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.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#318

Post by rsynnott »

mortenjorck wrote: post #140

> the end of 32 bit computing. By itself hardly a bold prediction, but the top reply makes a caveat about mobile devices, which gets some nods about mobile taking much longer to transition to 64-bit. Few might have imagined Apple would ship its first 64-bit phone only three years later, and a version of iOS before the decade was over that ended support for 32-bit phones!

32bit died on phones much quicker than on the desktop, in fact (though of course it died on servers first). Arguably, this should have been predictable; legacy software was a much smaller problem on phones.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#319

Post by austincheney »

wycy wrote: post #43
hyperpape wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#320

Post by scarface74 »

xmprt wrote: post #247
scarface74 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack isn’t a “large player” they are nowhere near being profitable and are nowhere in the same league as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google or Microsoft. The app ecosystem was growing like crazy in 2010. It was a year and a half into “there is an app for that”. Facebook had already pivoted to being big in mobile. The same can be said about Uber. Once the companies have a profitable and sustainable business model that d…

Regardless of profitability I think people are spending a lot more money on the internet today as they were 10 years ago. Subscription services, gig economy, and online retail have exploded in the last 10 years in a way that I don't think many people predicted.

Everyone saw online retail exploding by 2010. Amazon was already big and growing, Barnes and Noble was already struggling against Amazon and Apple/iTunes was the number one music retailer as bricks and mortar music retailers had started to close.

By 2010, streaming services were big, Apple was selling movies and TV shows digitally and had already started removing DVD drives from its computers.

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