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Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

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Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#121

Post by jashmatthews »

ratww wrote: post #47
wycy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t that describe the rise of JavaScript? I haven’t done or seen any specific benchmarks, but I gathered that JS was among the slowest of languages.

No, it's pretty fast [1]. Chrome and V8 were released in 2008, and Node.js (which leverages V8) in 2009. V8 was already considered fast back then. Mozilla and Apple also focused on optimizing their JS stack in the following years. [1] I'm not a fan of linking to benchmarks, but that's the best I can do: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... / https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benc…

Google’s marketing for Chrome and V8 was incredibly effective. We’ve basically forgotten that Mozilla, Adobe and Apple were pushing JS perf long before V8 was released. Memory usage of early V8 was atrocious and real world performance was barely improved over Safari and Firefox but Google dominated dev mindshare for a decade.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#122

Post by [deleted] »

mminer237 wrote: post #73
TulliusCicero wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time. Interesting how plausible this one is, yet turned out to be terribly wrong: the newer hyped languages that got some uptake were largely compiled ones like Swift, Rust, Kotlin, and Dart.

I mean, JavaScript and Python have definitely become much more popular for many more things than they were in 2010. I doubt Swift replaced much besides other compiled languages, and Kotlin just compiles to Java anyway. Dart's VM idea was dropped so its small usage is largely compiling to JS still. I would say that the overall idea of performance being traded for programmer time is definitely happening despite the eme…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#123

Post by guidoism »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #104
TulliusCicero wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time. Interesting how plausible this one is, yet turned out to be terribly wrong: the newer hyped languages that got some uptake were largely compiled ones like Swift, Rust, Kotlin, and Dart.

One thing that always really bugged me about the "the language will figure it out" philosophy is the complete disregard towards carbon footprint. Like yeah, you can make an interpreted dynamic language that's pretty neat, but you can also make something like go, swift, or Julia that jits and also captures 90% of that ease of use while significantly reducing your hosting costs/energy consumption. Going forward I think…

I'm actually pretty amazed at what the Javascript VM people have done in the past decade. It's way more than I ever expected.

As far as the carbon footprint, well, yeah, it depends. At Google I remember a friend talking about how he cringed whenever he added more code to the pipeline that ingests the entire internet. He said that he wondered how much extra carbon was release into the atmosphere just because of his stupid code.

As for numpy, we are seeing that loops are stupid and Iverson and APL were right. :-)

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#125

Post by geerlingguy »

jtolmar wrote: post #109
TulliusCicero wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time. Interesting how plausible this one is, yet turned out to be terribly wrong: the newer hyped languages that got some uptake were largely compiled ones like Swift, Rust, Kotlin, and Dart.

It's also been quite a decade of growth for old stodgy languages. In 2010, it seemed like C++, Java, and Javascript were never going to change, but they've all significantly cleaned up their acts. I think the prediction still had a kernel of truth to it though - every edge that chip manufacturers and JIT developers can give us has been burned away on slower and slower client-side rendering frameworks.

And PHP. PVP 5.3 was the newest version in 2010 and as the years wore on many thought HipHop by Facebook would start to take over for serious PHP applications. PHP 7 completely changed the course of the PHP community and took the air out of HHVM’s sails.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#126

Post by crimsonalucard »

darzu wrote: post #21

> Functional programming / dynamic languages will go out of fashion. Glad this didn't happen. Also it's weird to me to equate functional & dynamic like that.

The majority of programming today is not functional at all. I think Functional programming became sort of a tertiary elitist buzzword similar to drunken style kung fu. The effectiveness of the style is well known among practitioners and those that don't practice it look upon it as if it was a foreign and strange art.

What people don't realize is that functional programming is mixed martial arts. The art of combat brought down to the science of combat. I think there is little chance FP will become mainstream. MMA didn't become popular because it was the most effective art, it became popular because it was packaged up into entertainment.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#127

Post by zargon »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #54
haunter wrote: post #5

IsaacL nailed it the best https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1027093 And surprisingly the WoW one is the most off :D

> - As Moore's Law marches on, dynamic languages that are even slower than Ruby are likely to catch on. They may be to Ruby what Ruby is to Java, trading even more programmer time for CPU time. Interesting how plausible this one is, yet turned out to be terribly wrong: the newer hyped languages that got some uptake were largely compiled ones like Swift, Rust, Kotlin, and Dart.

In my opinion, Electron is the fulfillment of that prediction.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#128

Post by geerlingguy »

jamiek88 wrote: post #78
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they sold it all in the 2013 bubble and now regret it. (This happened to a friend of mine - he sold it all off to pay-off his student loans before the 2013 bubble peaked - it'd be worth over $10m at the end of 2017).

Or, like me, literally deleted my wallet with 100 ish coins in 'cos I couldn't be bothered finding a USB key. I though 'oh I'll just mine a few more next week' when I get my new laptop (!!! mining on cpu). Narrator: He forgot about it.

I had something like 20 coins, but it was on a secondary computer that didn’t have backups and was long since recycled. You can believe I spent a few hours digging through all my backups to find the wallet back in 2017... ah well.

Re: Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)

#130

Post by agumonkey »

jnwatson wrote: post #114
hyperpape wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dynamic languages slower than ruby prediction didn't hold up either. The past ten years have just seen nibbling around the edges for dynamic languages, without any compelling ideas about how to make them fundamentally more expressive.

Python is eating the world. In many measures, Python is slower than Ruby.

python won't last, just like ruby / js / php

I sense a strong convergence between all of them (builtin DS, linguistic traits, bits of static typing)

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