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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)

#261

Post by swagasaurus-rex »

gcpwnd wrote: post #42
zozbot234 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 i…

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.

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

#263

Post by kelnos »

clashmeifyoucan wrote: post #256

> -People become more privacy aware after an image search engine with facial recognition is popularized and they realize that any picture ever posted of them by anyone is in the search result for their name. People become less willing to let others take compromising pictures as if they become posted, the link back to them will be made. Not an image search engine as much as whole governments but this rings eerily true…

The sad part is that I don't think this has caused people, on average, to become all that much more privacy-aware. Or, if they are, they still don't really care.

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

#264

Post by buzzkillington »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #245
buzzkillington wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> 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 seeing people use lisp like languages unironically for the first time in decades.

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

#265

Post by justincormack »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #41
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. I dont think this happened?

Well Moore's Law had pretty much ended then, but it was less visible.

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

#266

Post by jaggirs »

hyperpape wrote: post #84
wycy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 beautif…

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.

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

#267

Post by gerikson »

omegabravo wrote: post #259
surround wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is lobste.rs

lobste.rs is invite only which makes it hard for people like me to sign up

Feel free to provide me an email at @gerikson on Twitter (DM) and I will send you an invite!

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

#268

Post by genidoi »

mc3 wrote: post #158
ionwake wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forget how hard it is to look after it. Bitcoin is like fairy dust , nearly impossible to grasp.

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.

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

#270

Post by ss3000 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #41
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. I dont think this happened?

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.

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