Reading Paul Graham's "beating the average" I can't help think that Steve Yegge's prediction #5 and #10 are mutually exclusive: Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Prediction #10: In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. There's no way any Lisp dialect could reach top ten if most programmers are still average ; )
Ten predictions (2004)
311–320 of 324 posts
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
One place you see a lot of good "under the covers" stuff going on is with .Net 4.5. The task parallel stuff they have is really decent. You still have to think a little bit about concurrency issues, but if you are careful to use their thread safe structures, they have taken care of a lot of the harder parts for you. It is a neat model that just plays out pretty nicely. Another cool product is Disruptor - they have fi…
If threads or processes or distributed computing is being used under the covers, does it still count as multi-threaded programming? I could go out and design an machine/OS that didn't use what we would think of threads (think Atari's Transputer [1]), and all these implicit threaded schemes would still work with my new construct. Now, we might not have transputers, but some of us get to use GPUs and such (still niche,…
Somebody still needs to be the smart experienced guy. Somebody still needs to write the language VMs, low level libraries and interfaces, device support etc etc.
I really don't get on with this mindset that someone else can fix it.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#313Does anyone know why XML was so hyped when it came out? I remember reading article after article about how great it was and how it was going to revolutionize everything. Looking back on it, it all seems kind of silly.
It was that great. It got us away from the era when everybody would make up binary formats to store data, into the era where you can debug by eyeball instead of with a hex dump utility, and use off-the-shelf parsers as a bonus. That's plenty enough revolution for one generation of technology. Everything after that is gravy.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
XML has a few issues compared to JSON: * attributes v. tagnames * no "anonymous list" * infinitely large surface area [ {name: joe, age: 12 }, {name: bob, age: 23} ] joe 12 bob 23 The access pattern for json is much easier: obj[1].name The infinitely large surface area of XML is painful. Namespaces, entities, xsd/schema, cdata, cdata-in-cdata. It's an alright data / interchange format and especially suited to certain…
{'users': [{'name': 'joe', 'age': '12' }, {'name': 'bob', 'age': '23'}]}
Not to be pedantic, but:
{users: [{name: 'joe', age: 12}, {name: 'bob', age: 23}]}
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#3151. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though. 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. Github is cool but with all the cheapskate web devs (no offense, I am one of them) I don't think it is _that_ profitable. 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. Not really.…
9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. Well he wasn't that far. The high-end laptop market is utterly dominated by Apple: already in 2007 they had more than 30% (growing by 8% from 2006) of the high-end laptop market and now they're at more than 50%. So their sales there exceed those of all the other players combined. They're also the uncont…
Premium products almost never dominate in global markets.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#316I came late to this thread, but I want to add an item to Stevey's list of "trust tests" for prediction #2, "someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications": SOVEREIGNTY: I would strongly prefer outsourcing to large companies with C* executives, boards, and/or founders who really "believe" in the mission of the company, have complete financial control, and are generally unlikely to even need…
> switching costs are high Why? switching to private school is expensive. Switching from is not. In the public system, schools change every 3-5 years anyway. " and it strikes me that private schools may be less likely to change drastically over the course of 8-12 years than a public school." Why? public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates.
> switching to private school is expensive
Well, _paying_ for it is expensive in terms of money, it's not the switching that costs money generally.
The switching costs I'm referring to are "social" ones. I don't want to shop my kids around schools if I can avoid it, because each time they'll have to make new friends and be "the new kid" for 1-2 years.
In the public system, you change schools twice, elementary -> middle and middle -> high school (or just once, k-8 "middle school" -> high school), and each time you generally know lots of other kids because schools are arranged as "feeders", and a given high school class is made up of cohorts from each of the feeders.
> public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates.
Public schools are beholden to state budgets, and I don't like they choices that were made a couple decades ago when _I_ was in public schools (no music or "arts" education at all in my k-6 school), so I shudder to think of what's going to happen nowadays. State budgets fluctuate along with the political climate.
That's my thinking, anyway.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly, in fact I'd say there's a lot more multithreading going on today, it's just that it's hidden behind whatever JEE framework people are using. This isn't a bad thing, enterprise developers (i.e. 90% of us) shouldn't have to worry about mutexes any more than they have to worry about interrupts or sorting algorithms.
Out of interest, how does an enterprise developer (whatever that means) ensure consistency of data and good performance, the two competing aims of a decent mutex/lock strategy? Is it taken on trust that someone else handles this, and therefore hidden in 'safe' data structures or... ?
I'm talking about higher level abstractions than concurrency frameworks integrated in Java or .Net . In an enterprise world, if you need to parallelise tasks between multiple consumers, you just add them to a JMS queue/topic and tweak some obscure xml to say who consumes it and how.
In fact, using any thread or concurrency mechanism in JEE code is considered a code smell, you should be handling it with the Spring/JMS/Jboss setup
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Out of interest, how does an enterprise developer (whatever that means) ensure consistency of data and good performance, the two competing aims of a decent mutex/lock strategy? Is it taken on trust that someone else handles this, and therefore hidden in 'safe' data structures or... ?
I'm talking about higher level abstractions than concurrency frameworks integrated in Java or .Net . In an enterprise world, if you need to parallelise tasks between multiple consumers, you just add them to a JMS queue/topic and tweak some obscure xml to say who consumes it and how. In fact, using any thread or concurrency mechanism in JEE code is considered a code smell, you should be handling it with the Spring/JMS…
Never done any JEE, or 'Enterprisey' coding in my life, so I wouldn't recognise code smell if it was waved under my nose :)
I've had the sort of career that involved highly-optimised in-memory databases, high-volume, low-latency payment processing and stuff like that. So I'm used to dealing with this stuff direct.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#319Lisp will never be popular. Everyone likes to kiss the ass of Lisp, and talk about how transformative and powerful it is, then they go and write a bunch of Python or Ruby or Lua or Perl or anything other than Lisp, because infix is just much much more readable. When was the last time you went to a math class and the professor wasn't using infix notation? Even the Common Lisp Hyperspec has to resort to infix notation…
The mistake here is the "everyone." I agree that infix is easier for some math, but otherwise I genuinely prefer prefix, and I'm not the only one. So the question now is, are those of us who have no problem with prefix notation merely a random minority of the population, like people who are left-handed, or are we a minority like say the minority who are good at math, or the minority who used the Internet in 1995? I'm…
I've always thought that the ease with which I picked up prefix notation had to do with the amount of time I spent using HP RPN calculators as a teenager. Postfix and prefix are not that different.
But RPN calculators are harder to find these days, I think.
Re: Ten predictions (2004)
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were in college in 2004 it was pretty unavoidable
Facebook didn't launch 'til February 2004. Initially it was only available at US Ivy League colleges and, then, in 2005 at some international universities, but it was not "unavoidable" in 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook
Perhaps I spoke too broadly, but I signed up (according to my Facebook account) September 6, 2004 and only did so after being nagged by friends and acquaintances. So, for me when I look back, it felt unavoidable.
Note: I went to a university in the US but not an Ivy