The Eiffel Programming Language.
Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#352Oberon.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#353erlang. As a programmer it was a revelatory thing of beauty. When we tried to spread it within our org we found that the 'typical' (even relatively strong) programmer resisted its concepts and found it hard to learn. Therefore it didn't scale for us.
Most probably because of a lack of functional programming mindset.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#354Rebol
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#355Mobile Augmented Reality or ARKit, But it was just hype as previous. I mean nothing in mainstream. I think main reason is UX or User Interface. It is very hard for people who do not know how it works and expect it to work perfect (in low light etc) as with normal user interface of smartphone. It was not very intuitive for normal user because of Smartphone limitations. I can think that it might take in future if they…
Give it time.
Just as a frame of reference, the original iPad sold less units in its first year than the PlayStation VR.
Virtual reality is still in its infancy, and honestly AR is a technology that's going to have to build on top of a lot of VR's technical underpinnings.
Hardware growth takes a lot longer and more iterations than software. VR is going to be huge eventually, and AR is then going to dwarf VR... eventually.
There's a lot of work in wireless signal standards, battery life, displays, and pure computational power that needs to happen before these technologies can deliver on the promise though.
We're slightly past the Newton stage, and somewhere behind the Windows Mobile 3.1 era with these technologies. It's going to still be a while before we see the "iPhone" for VR/AR, and even then, it'll be a few years before we see mass adoption.
But in my opinion, the end result is an inevitably.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#356E-Ink. It is the "correct" choice for display technology, and with enough research money put into it, it could replace these abominable light-emitting displays. But what we already have is "good enough", despite all of the hidden costs, and so we're stuck with it.
Many years ago, I heard a politician give a speech, and he used a phrase there (I am translating from German, so it might sound a little clumsy): The worst enemy of Good is Better.
Over time, I have come to believe that the worst enemy of Better is "Good Enough".
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#357Smalltalk. Everybody was supposed to be able to program, not just professional software developers.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#358I'm not sure I expected it to take the world "by storm", but I expected more from Google Wave. It was a great concept, by a major company, but it was too slow on release and the rollout killed it. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have lasted anyways. Google was in the process of minimizing their federated communication services by that point, and that was another major selling point of Google Wave's initial propos…
They used invites for the Gmail rollout as well but maybe those immediately created accounts. I seem to remember invites being sold on eBay.
The difference is once you got a Gmail account you could immediately start sending and receiving email from it rather than twiddling your thumbs till someone you know got invited.
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#359WebTV
Well didn't it? Considering Youtube and Netflix... Or is that some specific technology that I don't know about?
He's probably referring to the 1995 set-top box company cofounded by Steve Perlman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSN_TV#The_WebTV_set-top_box
Re: Ask HN: What tech were you convinced would take the world by storm but didn't?
#360I'm not sure I expected it to take the world "by storm", but I expected more from Google Wave. It was a great concept, by a major company, but it was too slow on release and the rollout killed it. In retrospect, it probably wouldn't have lasted anyways. Google was in the process of minimizing their federated communication services by that point, and that was another major selling point of Google Wave's initial propos…
Wave's rollout was botched, its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware, and its UX (which didn't seem to "get" that sometimes you need to isolate your current work context from the global feed of activity in order to focus) was perplexing. But its legacy of helping to popularize Operational Transforms (and by extension, CRDTs) beyond academic circles did indeed live on - for instance,…
> its performance requirements were too ahead-of-their-time for 2009 hardware
For 2009 hardware running javascript in a browser, you mean? I was running much fancier native stuff much faster (including 3d games) on low-to-mid tier 2009 hardware.
> So in many ways, it accomplished exactly what to set out to do.
I think it definitely accomplished its goals technically, but it certainly failed on adoption. I personally never got into it. I tried it quite early and didn't like it. It was clunky and confusing and didn't seem very useful to me at the time. I wonder if it were re-created with slicker UX (and good performance), would I like it...