171–180 of 469 posts
When I was choosing my university major, everybody was telling me don't choose computer science. The job market is saturated and everybody is a software engineer, choose electronics. I chose CS. Fast-forward today, most of the people I know who were in electronic have switched to software.
I thought that giving everyone in the world access to the sum total of human knowledge via the internet would be all upside. And I thought that conspiracy theories were harmless fun.
I thought everyone in the future would spend their free time reading science journals, which I discovered via Usenet (because no one in my physical environment read them). Two decades later we elected a president who has said that climate change is a Chinese hoax and wind turbines cause cancer.
Oh god, there were so many boneheaded 90s predictions about computers. 1) We just expected single core performance to double forever every 2 years or so. Many of us were ignorant of single-core performance scaling and the memory wall issues. I want to be clear: Computer Architects were warning people about this in the early 90s but many ignored their inconvenient truth. 2) 2D GUIs would evolve into 3D GUIs - maybe VR…
Oh god, there were so many boneheaded 90s predictions about computers. 1) We just expected single core performance to double forever every 2 years or so. Many of us were ignorant of single-core performance scaling and the memory wall issues. I want to be clear: Computer Architects were warning people about this in the early 90s but many ignored their inconvenient truth. 2) 2D GUIs would evolve into 3D GUIs - maybe VR…
> 3) Low/no code drag-and-drop style programming tools would take away many dev jobs I started programming as a kid in the early 90s, and went to college in the late 90s/early 00s. It might sound crazy in hindsight, but between these tools and outsourcing, everyone I talked to thought being a programmer was going to be a dead end minimum wage type job, and I was strongly advised by many to pick a different major.
Don't worry, the big tech companies are spending ungodly amounts to make this happen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We keep on chasing and chasing. I think the closest we’ve come so far is excel and most in programming scorn it instead of revering it.
IKR. Excel and the other spreadsheet variants are the gateway drug to software development. There is no other tool that has such a low entry to barrier and is so enticing to scale up into a ridiculously complex product. It eventually does get to a point that when the original user/developer is ready to change their job someone says 'OK can we turn this into a webapp or something... this is nuts. Lets hire someone fro…
Ah, HyperCard ... RIP.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a way most of these came true. > Thin clients The cloud. > Palm pilots. Cell phones. > Windows, Mac, Linux Windows is still for business/economy. Linux is still for neckbeards. Although Mac is bigger than it was, the same people are still waiting for Apple silicon to catch on. > Keyboards and mice Have largely been supplanted by touch or gesture and consumer VR is becoming more and more viable every day.
Linux did eat the world, in the form of Android and all its variations. Every TV, most cellphones, many game consoles, and even your watch, are all probably running a Linux kernel. (And there's also ChromeOS, eating the education sector.)
When I was choosing my university major, everybody was telling me don't choose computer science. The job market is saturated and everybody is a software engineer, choose electronics. I chose CS. Fast-forward today, most of the people I know who were in electronic have switched to software.
As a 90s kid, I thought the internet would be more censorship resistant and less corporatized than it is today.
I was told when I majored in CS in year 2000 that "in 20 years Java will be the only language" and also "it will impossible for an American to get a job as they will be hiring all of their programmers from India"