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

What would once be a metal machine onto which you load executable code has become a thing that you can run virtually. Containers, serverless lambdas, dynamic language runtimes. Everything becomes faster, more fungible (a zeitgeist word but I mean it in the old way) and easier to work with.

We’ve known for a long time that software will eat the world — the comings and going’s of everyday life, once they are expressed as code, become infinitely easier to patch and improve using only a keyboard and display.

What’s new and ongoing is that software is eating itself. Another comment here expresses this as code becoming a data structure but that’s too pure for me. The practical improvements we’ll see don’t need to go that far and won’t be as zealous but we’ll reap the same rewards.

I’m personally looking forward to the next generations of infrastructure as code, where all the useful parts are factored out of the current monolithic ecosystems and become as composable as actual code is. It feels like, to draw an analogy with version control systems, we are at that 2005 boundary of CVS to SVN, and git is still around the corner.

In short, everyone will participate in the wholesale markets (on the retail side) through automated bids. You put in how much you want to pay and as electricity becomes more expensive, eventually you're curtailed. With uncertainty in a fully renewable fleet (assuming nukes don't get built in mass), the demand will have to match whatever supply is available. This is starting in baby steps today, but will likely extend in other areas as well. This will take a lot of software at several levels.

2.) Not something I'd expect to happen in the next decade, but I think automatic and frequent voting will eventually happen if security is ever improved.

As of now, it is still a long ways off and there is a relevant xkcd about a developer horrified about exposing voting to modern software development. The "demarchists" from the "Revelation Space" series by Alastair Reynolds do this where they're constantly polled and vote on issues and government is largely based off of that. I can't see that happening in the US (a true democracy and not a representative based one), but it could be used as a tool to help those in power make decisions. We have smartphones that could do this today.

3.) I'd really like to move away from Windows/Mac/Unix at some point in the next 50 years for something far more simple.

Tablets don't seem very productive and the average desktop os is an absolute cluster f. Honestly, I'd love to have a very simple computer with a fast processor and lots of RAM that is somehow similar in nature to a C64 in that it's fairly simple to just boot right in and give it some commands to move something around the screen and build a game in a half hour. I want more though... something similar to Wolfram Mathematica built-in. The internet, but no web browser black hole [you'd have to fix the internet first :) ]. In short, throw out the unmaintainable mess that exists today in favor of a better, more holistic design. Maybe the Smalltalk-80 method, but Forth, Rebol, and Tcl stick out more to me. Maybe something like the power of a modern computer with a far greater simplicity in mind. No automatic spyware pushed by Microsoft or incomprehensible bloat. There was a group looking into this sort of thing that reached out to me on HN once, but I've been unable to find their page. I believe they tried to use sea vessels as a metaphor for computing where a "dinghy" is what you would ultimately want. I know things are built off of the shoulders of Giants, but computing seems to have lost its way in some respect. Why is it so hard to do GUI stuff in 2021? There are 1000 frameworks and they're all insanely complicated.

It's so obvious that visual mediums are just going to continue to dominate time spent on screens. It seems odd that lots of the pixels we see today are manually put there by an artist or a sensor.