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Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

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Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#271

Post by lokedhs »

massung wrote: post #196

Not a prediction of the future, but rather something I've found quite funny over the years: watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle. My two favorite have been... 1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat. 2. Local processin…

Both of these hits home. Working at Sun in the late 90's, Java was a big thing, and while Sun was clearly way too early in their push for a universal virtual machine that could run anything, at the time people were complaining that Java could never be used for real software because of it not being natively compiled and using a GC.

Well, now everyone are using Javascript and Python, and no one seems to be complaining.

The second point is true as well. No matter where the pendulum is at the moment, there are always going to be people trying to push it in the other direction. Sun was again ahead of the time by pushing the Javastation, which was trying to do what the Chromebooks are doing. Then there was the Sunray of course, which was really cool, but a bit too specialised.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#272

Post by pyuser583 »

geoduck14 wrote: post #117
pyuser583 wrote: post #111

A lot fewer ads. A lot more paid services. Personal identification via the internet would be more streamlined - basically government backed digital is cards. Windows would rule - more or less. Usenet and IRC would be things. The big issue was not understanding the importance of ads. Or the impact. We imagined the web would oriented towards machines talking to machines. But machines don’t consume ads. So APIs are seco…

> But machines don’t consume ads. So APIs are second class citizens. This just gave me the most wonderful bad idea ever.

Ads for machines?

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#273

Post by ghaff »

gwbas1c wrote: post #211

I thought a different major OS would supplant Windows. It kind-of came true with more Android devices in use than Windows; but by now I thought Windows would be a minority player and we'd have a bigger variety of different desktop OSes. I also thought IDEs would be in 3D, with better visualizations of code running in parallel. And, I didn't expect web applications to be the norm for most people. I thought we'd have a…

>And, I didn't expect web applications to be the norm for most people.

Which is at least one reason why Windows kept its crown. By the time there were real alternatives (increased popularity of Macs--albeit mostly higher end of the price range--and Linux as a fairly viable option), the desktop OS just wasn't very interesting for a lot of people. And Chromebooks were a reasonable alternative for many, especially in K-12. For those who did still need a "fat client," Windows just tended to win by default.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#274

Post by rmah »

jvanderbot wrote: post #22
rmah wrote: post #7

Well, I certainly didn't expect to still be coding for loops by hand in a text editor after 30 years. Guess it could be worse, at least I (mostly) don't have to worry about memory leaks anymore. So that's something I guess.

data.for_each( |x| : x-> map ( blah blah blah )))))))

No offense kiddo, but that's just sugar. I was passing function pointers and arrays 30 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#275

Post by zffr »

csours wrote: post #264
nasir wrote: post #165

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.

2001 High School Graduate - People told me everything would be outsourced to India and it wasn't worth getting started in programming.

I got told this as a 2010 high school graduate too!

Didn’t listen since I loved programming and computers and it worked out well for me.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#276

Post by treespace88 »

massung wrote: post #196

Not a prediction of the future, but rather something I've found quite funny over the years: watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle. My two favorite have been... 1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat. 2. Local processin…

I call it the mainframe/desktop cycle.

The 90s was peak desktop. Everything was on the local hard drive.

Now everything is back on the mainframe(cloud) i fully expect it to cycle back to the desktop in some form. (we just won’t call it that)

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#277

Post by kieckerjan »

In the late '80s I started studying AI in college, fully expecting it to boom. That did not really happen, until it did. Unfortunately, most of what I learned about AI back then is pretty useless now.

I started with symbolic AI: parsers, tree searches, expert systems, logic. Even then it felt like this approach was stuck in a rut. So I changed lanes and studied early ML: decision trees, genetic algo's, nearest neighbours. When I left college SVM's were all the rage.

All that time, neural networks were deemed interesting but unfeasible for anything realistic. Little did we know.

I feel that if I wanted to get back into this field, I might as well start all over again.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#278

Post by zonethundery »

massung wrote: post #196

Not a prediction of the future, but rather something I've found quite funny over the years: watching so many things keep repeating themselves in a never-ending cycle. My two favorite have been... 1. Compiled (native) vs. interpreted (bytecode/VMs). It's this forever cycle of "performance required" that shifts to "portability required", which lacks performance, and gradually shifts back, and repeat. 2. Local processin…

My mid-90's telco experience involved a test deployment of citrix winframe (IIRC) dumb terminals. They worked okay, but not great.

Every tech or bigco job i've had there's at least one mainframe codger doing the Kinge George "You'll be back" number from hamilton. Don't think they anticipated the non-MF cloud. Almost always among the best engineers though in the joint though, IME.

I miss genuine differences in hardware. Happy hour discussions about alpha vs sparc vs intel etc. I'm hopeful that diversity will come back around as a thing.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#279

Post by thethought »

flukus wrote: post #119
jbb_hn wrote: post #33

We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application. I suppose that pieces of this became true with the proliferation and adoption of open source. Rather than a binary protocol, HTTP came out on top. SharePoint brought us WebParts which tried to put the power in the hands of busin…

> We wouldn’t make applications. Rather we’d deliver components which could interoperate via a binary contract. Components would be “snapped” together by non-programmers to make an application. This is how .net got it's crappy generic name. Back in it's early days it (and SOAP) was sold as the glue that would stitch all this together, just add a web reference and you'd have all this functionality in your project. It…

There was also OLE before ActiveX/COM and later DCOM. But the DLL’s were always a constant.

Re: Ask HN: 90s programmers, what did you expect the future of tech to look like?

#280

Post by brodouevencode »

spamizbad wrote: post #15

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…

By the late 90s it was fully expected that Java would take over everything.

And it did kinda for a while.

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