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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)

#271

Post by simonh »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #182
jnwatson wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is eating the world. In many measures, Python is slower than Ruby.

I would have agreed with you in 2013. Now it's just seems so fractured and all over the place, like it's had it's peak and is on the way back down.

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.

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

#272

Post by poutrathor »

moltar wrote: post #147
windowshopping wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it not easier to start something now than ten years ago? I would say he was correct on that one.

Maybe analysis paralysis? Facebook was started as a silly php script. Now you “need” half of npm, react, backend, devops etc to get started.

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...

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

#273

Post by simonh »

Aperocky wrote: post #88
eric-hu wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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 tr…

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

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

#274

Post by barrkel »

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…

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.

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

#276

Post by calcifer »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #251
aazaa wrote: post #185

The most striking thing about the thread is how little of current importance was even mentioned: - Bitcoin would become the decade's best investment by far - the President of the US would conduct foreign policy through Twitter - electric scooters would become a billion dollar business (Bird, Lime, etc.) - the sharing economy would threaten the taxi and hotel industries (AirBNB and Uber) - escalation of school shootin…

> escalation of school shootings Bubble thought. School shootings are down from previous highs and are actually very rare [0]. COVERAGE and willingness to use any incident to promote a very specific narrative are up. [0] https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-o...

"No Way To Prevent This", Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...

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

#277

Post by jacquesm »

jnwatson wrote: post #114
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.

Python is eating the world. In many measures, Python is slower than Ruby.

Python is just a very nice interface to a large amount of optimized C code.

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

#278

Post by scrollaway »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #235
geerlingguy wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did PHP 7 introduce optimizations similar to HipHop? 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)

Hack, right? I'm curious as well.

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

#279

Post by glaberficken »

thirtyseven wrote: post #215
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

> IE6 will hang around for a few years, but may die very rapidly in workplaces when some killer enterprise web application stops supporting it. Turns out the “killer enterprise web application” was YouTube :) https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

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.
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