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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?

#311

Post by ingas »

vidanay wrote: post #115
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…

> components which could interoperate via a binary contract COM still underlies an abhorrent amount of the Windows architecture.

At least it's possible to write COM in a measurable time. I did it in C++ although that was a pain. It became much easier in .NET.

CORBA - I did not even finish reading "Introduction to CORBA". A book of 500+ pages.

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

#313

Post by svilen_dobrev »

somewhen around '98, i was thinking the line reality-vs-computing in the what-people-deal-with graph will move towards computing, i.e. more people doing with more reality stuff, i.e. much more (business) analysts and similar much-higher-order programming, and much less coding monkeys. Instead, coding ate the reality part, now everyone and his brother is a combo analyst-and-coder in some primitive language-based-on-some-mathematical-concepts, and only very few companies really still employ domain/business analysts. Domain languages (DSLs) didn't get the attention they should have.. there are still no tools/practical-support for making them - so instead, one has to code them into some common primitive language of choice, putting the "why" knowledge into comments. (dont get me wrong, i am talking python/javascript, which although much higher level languages than e.g. C-et-al, but are still rather primitive comparing to even simplified domains of anything real) have fun

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

#314

Post by zozbot234 »

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.

> People told me everything would be outsourced to India

I'm not sure that this ever amounted to more than a urban legend. When you actually looked into the supposed outsourcing "trend", all you heard about was TheDailyWTF-grade horror stories.

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

#315

Post by dbg31415 »

I sure as fuck didn't think we'd see a flood of "SEEKING COBOL DEVELOPER" posts. But... as all those old guys fade out of the business, someone still has to maintain the mainframes. These massive mission-critical systems have struggled to migrate to the cloud. Realizing that a lot of the old machines are equal parts software and hardware... it's pretty crazy. I'm sure I'd want to die, but the rates for COBOL devs blow my mind.

Wish someone had told me, "Startups are fun, but look at how few of them make a buck. Be a dev, but focus on enterprise and public sector services..." As someone who likes making money, probably just as much if not more than solving problems... like happy for successes with startups in my 20s but I don't think it's something anyone should count on. Look for a nice fat enterprise / government contract. Buy yourself nice toys. Don't waste your time on projects that can't self-fund day 1.

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

#316

Post by maestroia »

coldpie wrote: post #220
jghn wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote from a mid-90s grad. I found that in the late 90s/early aughts my friends with the coolest jobs had degrees in something computational but not CS. Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Physics. They all had to learn to code in school and had background domain knowledge in some specialty. In contrast myself and my CS friends had, well, we had knowledge of Turing machines with infinite tapes. As the…

> In contrast myself and my CS friends had, well, we had knowledge of Turing machines with infinite tapes. Yeah. Going to school for Computer Science is probably the biggest regret in my life. I could have spent that time & money learning something useful/interesting instead, or better yet, not waste my time in University at all.

I graduated in 1990 with triple major in CompSci, Political Science, and Psychologywhi l it data science!) these gave me the domain and technical knowledge. Fast forward to today, and my biggest regret is either: a) not going directly on to get a PhD in Psychology, which would have been very beneficial now; or, b) not going back and taking over the family farm, which would see me truly working for myself at something which has true meaning and not creating TPS reports.

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

#317

Post by Smithalicious »

zozbot234 wrote: post #281
kieckerjan wrote: post #277

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 neighb…

Symbolic AI gets used quite a lot, we just don't call it AI. Even expert systems, often seen as a late-1980s dead end, are based on the same sort of technology one would use for efficiently querying any database.

If the computer solves problems and we know what it's doing, that's software engineering If the computer solves problems and we don't know what it's doing, that's AI If the computer doesn't solve problems and we don't know what it's doing, that's Friday afternoon

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

#318

Post by kstrauser »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #307
kstrauser wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frame relay? I’ll do you one better: remember when the Bellheads thought we’d be using ATM with virtual circuits for everything? I still re-read this every few years: https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

Ah yes, it was actually ATM that I was thinking of. Thanks. I have never been a network nerd, but I remember the buzz about ATM.

One of my prouder possessions is the Southwest Bell CO badge they issued me to let me go into their phone switching buildings. I was pretty happy to have survived my teens without ending up on their bad list.

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

#319

Post by bitwize »

I was expecting open source to take over. I was also expecting something like a decentralized form of cloud computing, similar to Plan 9 where you can just attach remote resources to your local PC and get instant access to their CPU, storage, etc. I was expecting the internet to turn into decentralized peer-to-peer "fabric" where everyone could publish or subscribe to whatever they wanted from their own machine. (When you consider that in the 90s a large server had a tenth or a hundredth of the CPU/RAM resources of even a rinky-dink HP Stream laptop from Wal-Mart of today, there's no reason this shouldn't be the case.) I was expecting diversified CPU architectures that could run architecture-agnostic "mobile code" like Java or Inferno, or even NeWS. A remote resource could send my machine code to run to present an interface, etc. We kind of got it, in the form of web apps but it's not quite the same. What we got was a corporate hellscape of siloed data and siloed user interaction.

I was expecting Guile to supplant Perl and Python, and for us all to benefit from the greater reach a Lisp could give us. What we got was motherfucking JavaScript as far as the eye can see, and development processes that hobble productivity so that companies can keep hiring programmer-clerks in legion strength and the executives remain unthreatened.

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

#320

Post by luismedel »

treespace88 wrote: post #276
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)

Something like "Look at this new tech! It allows you to run your own local cloud. We call it 'fog computing' and works even when you're offline"

Edit: OMG! the term exists! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_computing

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