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Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

#61

Post by vzaliva »

tester756 wrote: post #49
vzaliva wrote: post #45

I believe that formal verification is the next big thing. The problem with software reliability and security becoming the most critical one and this is the way to tackle it. There is sufficient research in academia which could be used as a foundation to build tools for the industry.

but is formal verification required/needed to solve latest security issues? I mean those related to: CPUs, NPM, External Libraries, parsers written in unsafe languages

In short: Yes. In many cases having solid formal foundation allows to fomulate high-level properties which would allow to catch even bugs like recent log4j. There is alreay a lot of work on formalization of ISA/CPU definitions which could allow to catch low-level bugs/expoloits.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

#62

Post by RedBeetDeadpool »

emteycz wrote: post #2

VR/AR will be big one day.

I actually like this answer. While I think the fact that "Meta" is now focusing on this feeds into a lot of hype, I don't think they are too far off base. The technology is finally getting usable, and the technology ecosystem necessary to allow it to be useful is mostly there. My analogy to this is that its in the brick phone phase of the mid 80's. Functional, bulky, seen as either a toy/gag, but has a core demographic of power users.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

#64

Post by derekp7 »

softwaredoug wrote: post #20

Unpopular opinion, but chase old things, not new ones. The big investment in your career will be ideas that stand the test of time. Relational Databases, data structures, programming paradigms, math, etc. Even in machine learning, just knowing core statistics and regression is more important than HottestNewArchitecture :TM:. Learn the ideas underneath these ideas, and you'll really grow and be able to better evaluate…

This reminds me of when I took a class on Sun Cluster. The instructor went to the Sun developers for his training, took everything they "invented" and drew parallels to items he had back in his mainframe and mini days. Turns out, nothing new was invented, just re-invented.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

#65

Post by [deleted] »

RedBeetDeadpool wrote: post #62
emteycz wrote: post #2

VR/AR will be big one day.

I actually like this answer. While I think the fact that "Meta" is now focusing on this feeds into a lot of hype, I don't think they are too far off base. The technology is finally getting usable, and the technology ecosystem necessary to allow it to be useful is mostly there. My analogy to this is that its in the brick phone phase of the mid 80's. Functional, bulky, seen as either a toy/gag, but has a core demograph…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

#66

Post by jeppesen-io »

throwaway24124 wrote: post #36
jeppesen-io wrote: post #29

ARM will continue to make inroads in the server space as adoption picks up and as more and more projects target that architecture Personal bias talking, but I'd expect to see modest uptick in Nix[os] interest Kubernetes will transition from new and exciting to a mature platform. Expect less new big features and more minor improvements

Genuinely curious, I've heard of Nix OS but I don't know anything about it. Why do you think interest will grow, and would you recommend it?

I love it, but I'd hold off on recommending it outright for everyone. There's a learning curve to be sure and if you run software not provided in its packing system it can take time to port to the Nix way

Just about everything in a NixOS is configured in a declarative way, but that only really scratches the surface. It's the first Linux OS I've used that configuration is done at a wholistic level

Say for example you have a RHEL/Debian Linux server and you want to see how it’s configured. This sounds easy, but can be quite time consuming. You can see what packages are installed but then you’d need to examine all the /etc files. Try and see which ones are modified. Look at all services, look for further configuration that may exist in /opt or /usr. When you get to a certain scale tools like Chef, Puppet or Salt tend to help with managing configuration. Over time to meet compliance and monitoring requirements configuration can grow. And that’s not getting into any filesystem permissions you may set.

If you're using `yum install` or `apt-get` to install packages out of the system repos, you'll get the latest package in that repo. Run that command at different times, you can get a different package version

In NixOS the system and packages are versioned together; makes for very reproducible systems. The downside/upside (depending on your needs) is, updating your kernel will update your packages in lockstep

With NixOS, you can configure a complete system with a single file making Chef, Puppet or Salt obsolete. Once you get over that first hurdle of using NixOS and moving your workloads to it, it tends to be easier to maintain

The major downside I run into is that most of the world does not use Nix[OS]. So if you need something not provided by Nix[OS], you’ll need to learn how to make your own package (derivation)

There are many caveats to everything I said above, but its the general idea

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

#67

Post by cinntaile »

majewsky wrote: post #56
cinntaile wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware has gotten more power hungry over the years not less. As long as people are more expensive than energy/hardware, I don't see this changing anytime soon. Maybe we'll get better at utilizing our high performance hardware by offloading the computations more and more to the cloud but overall energy usage will likely keep going up. Growing economies and cheap, abundant energy go hand in hand.

> Hardware has gotten more power hungry over the years not less. Hardware has massively improved in the power/watt and computation/joule categories. The increased power consumption is because of rebound effect. If we really only used cellphones for telephone calls and SMS, we could build them to last for months on a single charge. Yet we have to charge them every day because they are built to do not just telephony, b…

I'm aware of the efficiency gains, it doesn't change what I said though. Power consumption for computing won't go down anytime soon in my opinion.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

#68

Post by Delphiza »

Anything in sustainability.

Climate change and related issues are driving big changes that large corporates are already having to address regardless of impending legislation.

Energy efficiency, waste management, sustainable computing, carbon markets, regulatory compliance and reporting (ISO50001), smart grids, EV logistics... there are so many areas.

Anything that you choose to focus on next year will be immensely valuable and important when the demand suddenly picks up before the end of the decade. You can build up on your existing technical foundations.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

#69

Post by mamcx »

softwaredoug wrote: post #20

Unpopular opinion, but chase old things, not new ones. The big investment in your career will be ideas that stand the test of time. Relational Databases, data structures, programming paradigms, math, etc. Even in machine learning, just knowing core statistics and regression is more important than HottestNewArchitecture :TM:. Learn the ideas underneath these ideas, and you'll really grow and be able to better evaluate…

Specially when the "old things" are over-represented by things like C/C++/Shell, Unix and not Pascal/ADA, HyperCard/DBase/FoxPro (your "low-code" from the past!), Amiga, BeOS, etc

A LOT of the old things were ahead of the time and forgotten. Also, a lot are still in their infancy (I think RDBMs are still too immature!).

Is likely that marrying that old things with (1, at most 2) new things is the way to go.

Re: Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

#70

Post by kristov »

I am possibly alone in thinking the biggest thing to happen in computing in the 80s/90s was the spreadsheet. Having an immeasurable affect on the productivity of organizations large and small, to this day. So what does the 21st century version of the spreadsheet look like?
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