Any project that works with information inside a computer program as well as data has a chance to be 20 years ahead of its time. Current software development supports information very poorly, and supports data very well. Right now the most we can do to work with information is to extract it after the fact using Data Analytics. If we could work with information inside a program that would be a huge leap from where we are now.
Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
111–120 of 121 posts
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#112Maidsafe
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#113https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Xanadu I want to believe.
Funny how I encountered one of the problems this tries to solve. My smartphone died so I booted up my trusty Samsung Galaxy S (yea that's S without a number on it) and went about trying to flash a newer version of android to it, only to find about 90% of download links to the necessary programs to be dead. This is only 6-7 years ago. Imagine how much of the internet becomes useless so quickly.
The phone I currently use, is a Samsung Galaxy S III - which is 7 years old runs better than it ever has. It runs Android 7 via LineageOS.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#114APL comes to my mind.
Had some considerable influence on the development of Lisp, too.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny how I encountered one of the problems this tries to solve. My smartphone died so I booted up my trusty Samsung Galaxy S (yea that's S without a number on it) and went about trying to flash a newer version of android to it, only to find about 90% of download links to the necessary programs to be dead. This is only 6-7 years ago. Imagine how much of the internet becomes useless so quickly.
The phone I currently use, is a Samsung Galaxy S III - which is 7 years old runs better than it ever has. It runs Android 7 via LineageOS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_III https://lineageos.org/
It can't be 7 years old, it was released 2012.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#116APL comes to my mind.
Had some considerable influence on the development of Lisp, too.
Really? Seems to me that Lisp has strongly resisted adopting any syntactic sugar whatsoever for terse array manipulation. I can hardly imagine where in any mainstream dialect this APL influence is palpable.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#117What does that really mean? Do you mean projects that are being worked on right now and that will be delivered in 20 years? Or projects that are finished now and that will be understood in 20 years? Or projects that people thought wouldn't be possible before 20 years? 1: VR, self driving vehicles, nuclear fusion, artificial photosynthesis, quantum computers, robots that can manipulate things like men, wave energy har…
>like men like people
These are synonyms and your comment adds nothing to the conversation.
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#118I'd say IE5.5. All those dHTML shit, like DirectX, MIDI, .htc (Javascript Components), for videos, a sane CSS box model, css and inter-page transformations, VML for vector graphics, VRML for VR (buzzword), XML islands (influenced e4x and later JSX), the original xhr object, native cryto APIs, etc. You can even program jscript on server side with asp, or execute standalone with ActiveScript, even control native GUI li…
I'm a bit late to this discussion but wanted to add that Microsoft started developing desktop apps that were web-like in appearance and behaviour back in 2000 (e.g, MS Money). Here we are in 2017 and we've returned to the same idea. Here are Microsoft's Inductive User Interface (IUI) Guidelines from 2001:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997506.aspx
"The IUI is a new user interface model that suggests how to make software applications simpler by breaking features into screens or pages that are easy to explain and understand. Microsoft has implemented this model in Microsoft Money 2000"
Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#119Re: Ask HN: What projects are 20 years ahead of their time?
#120Definitely https://cloudron.io. I dream of a world where everyone has their own server to go with their smartphone. Also, sandstorm as has already been mentioned elsewhere