Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record

by ingve • 11 years ago

303 119 11 years ago

shalmanese• 11 years ago

It's especially important for blog posts like this to have a very obvious timestamp on the page somewhere. This is a contemporary post but I couldn't verify that until I went into the archive view.

violentvinyl• 11 years ago

There is a worrying trend in minimlaist design lately. It seems that more and more blogs are leaving out information about the author (less impotant here) and when the post was created, two very important pieces of information!

tinco• 11 years ago

That's not a trend, it's been like that since the dawn of the internet.

ad-hominem• 11 years ago

Minimalist design has nothing to do with "omitting relevant information"

yoodenvranx• 11 years ago

The same happens on a large percentage of open source projects. Dear project maintainers, if I go to your website, one of first things I want to know is when the last version was reased and perhaps what's new in this rease.

Sometimes you have to dig deep into the online docs to find this info.

(I am looking at you, matotlib -.-)

simonh6• 11 years ago

Prediction #7 about the mobile revolution was particularly interesting to me at the time. I was working in the telecoms industry and everyone was saying that super-smartphones were coming out in just a year, 2 at most, that would revolutionize everything, but that was all marketing hype. The reality at the time was to my mind looking really bad. WAP was pretty much a conscious effort by the telecoms industry to trap itself (or actually the users) in a technological stone age ghetto run by committees of marketing executives. The fact that Apple forced the carriers to allow an open mobile internet was utterly shocking to me - in a good way. I was expecting mobile computing to be a dismal carrier-controlled dystopia for a generation at least.

TorKlingberg• 11 years ago

The phone makers at the time really had no idea how to make a full-featured mobile computer OS. Nothing happened until Apple giving them a kick and Google saved their butts by handing them Android on a platter.

monort• 11 years ago

You are forgetting about Windows Mobile for Smartphone and Symbian. There was a reason to expect smartphone revolution - because early adopters had smartphones in 2004.

nerdcity• 11 years ago

Poor Palm :(

cannam• 11 years ago

I remember going to a trade show in London in 2001 called "m-Commerce World", which was all about the impending revolution in mobile transactions and payments.

At the time I worked for a web development company that identified itself as an "e-business solutions agency". It was in the process of collapse following the dotcom bust, and we were looking out for any new opportunities to cling to. I remember feeling a bit second-rate at this trade show when I introduced the company I worked for, because we were only "e-business" while the exhibitors were very proud of being "m-".

Nothing came of any of it of course.

masklinn3• 11 years ago

The reality at the time was to my mind looking really bad. WAP

shudders I worked in that space right around the time the iPhone landed, WAP was way beyond looking really bad, it was an unmitigated disaster, it was horror.

The fact that Apple forced the carriers to allow an open mobile internet was utterly shocking to me - in a good way.

To be fair, high-end nokia did already have "open mobile internet" available. Technically anyway: compatibility was a craspshoot and the experience was terrible, I had an E70 with a relatively competent webkit-based browser (IIRC), it did technically render pages but:

* very small screen, making interacting with pages difficult (mobile-adapted pages were not a thing, and the browser didn't do much adaptation)

* arrows moving a small cursor around on a small unzoomed page made for a terrible experience

* device lacked both CPU and (especially) RAM, interactions would be very slow and browser would regularly crash and OOM

* flash was still very present, the device didn't handle it at all, it didn't cope that well with javascript either

After it was released Opera Mini did help with the resources side (but not UI and compatibility). Anyway my point is, open mobile internet was available before the iphone, it was just an utter wreck of an experience (though still not as bad as WAP)

chiph• 11 years ago

I did some playing-around with WAP for my Moto RAZR. Turned out the phone could only store a page stack of about .. five. This varied with page complexity, so you might only get 3 deep before it locked-up the phone.

Tloewald5• 11 years ago

To be fair, high-end nokia did already have "open mobile internet" available.

Not really sure this is relevant. Apple forced the carriers to change their business models -- first AT&T and then the others; Nokia et al just played along. I was really disappointed that Google did not persevere with selling their own phone -- there was this shining moment where it looked like Apple and Google would unite to tear down the carriers; I think Google's shying away from customer service may well prove pivotal -- e.g. it's going to be hard to sell cars if you don't do customer service.

People often point out that Apple doesn't really understand the cloud or that Amazon's forays into hardware have been at best mixed. Maybe. Google -- alone of its rivals -- doesn't understand end-users (its customers are advertisers). Which is more important in the long run? (Bezos may suck as a boss, but Amazon's customer service is first-rate.)

beagle3• 11 years ago

I was working on WAP at the time (1999/2000) as well. And then a colleague brought back an i-mode[0] phone from a business trip to Japan.

It was small, had almost a week on standby (if you used it as a phone, which -- before the smartphone revolution, most people did). And it could actually browse the internet properly - gateways had to do some conversion, but unlike WAP, it was working with a real HTML subset.

It was that day that I understood the death of WAP is imminent, the mobile revolution is coming, and that HTML is here to rule mobile as well - because the future was already there, just not evenly distributed.

Prediction is hard, especially about the future, but describing the unevenly distributed present is easier.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-mode

andy_ppp• 11 years ago

How far off is prediction 9 really? What do sales matter when Apple takes more profits from their computer business than all those combined; Apple having a 30% plus margin and other computer makers a 2-3%?

simonh6• 11 years ago

Indeed. It seems likely that Apple could cut their margins and grab that 50% if they wanted to, but since that would reduce their overall profits why would they want to? It seems like Apple can at this point have pretty much whatever share of the market it chooses.

alphadevx• 11 years ago

It's interesting to me that Apple value profit over market share, unlike many of their rivals.

emn134• 11 years ago

If so, that's a dangerous game apple is playing. It's hard to predict the future, and it's by no means certain that it can continue to compete with the likes of android - being so much smaller than android meaning that they're playing in a pool largely shaped by others. They're doing well now - but who knows for how long?

AndrewDucker• 11 years ago

I don't care what profits my phone-maker makes.

I care that they produce a decent phone, and that they have enough market-share that there's a software ecosystem.

Tloewald5• 11 years ago

More importantly, I'd suggest that if you include the iPad in laptops then the prediction is pretty much correct without further discussion.

emn134• 11 years ago

Even if you include the ipad, it's still not true. The top 3 sellers nowadays have about 50% of the PC marketshare, and they're still IBM(but now called lenovo), HP and Dell. That's around million units - well in excess of ipad sales (mac's don't really make a dent). If you took the top 5...

And I don't think it's really reasonable to include tablets at all. The motivation is that they're a new, unforeseen development? But then you really should be including android tablets in those numbers too; and those happen to be sold primarily by other vendors.

At the end of the day, it's clear that tablets aren't laptops, nor do they look like they really replace laptops (especially not the ipad - you could quibble about microsoft's offerings, but those haven't been too successful yet.)

The heart of the prediction was that apple would come to dominate the laptop business. Clearly, it has not. It's still mostly windows-vendors. If you include tablets, apple does better, but there too it's a minority market share; android dominates.

emn134• 11 years ago

Whether sales or profits matter depend on your perspective. I think revenue is a better guide than either.

Profit is really susceptible to distortion based on reporting. What exactly are you counting as costs? Do you include investments in the future? That's really a business choice, and it doesn't necessarily mean much.

At the end of the day, it's only the shareholders that really care about that profit. As a customer, it doesn't really matter whether that money ends up at the company or its contractors - you're paying either way.

As an investor, you (eventually) care about profit. If you're just trying to understand what the customers value enough to spend money on, revenue is a better guide.

crdb• 11 years ago

For reasons that seem baffling in retrospect, Amazon understood this long before any of its major competitors

I don't think Amazon really "understood". It's more that (according to "The Everything Store", anyway), accidentally, some emergency servers were reprovisioned as servers on demand for a bunch of frustrated devs who couldn't get resources the traditional way. And then demand just exploded and they thought why not sell it and see what happens.

It is true that Bezos appears to have a knack for spotting great products that appear accidentally in his org tree, and spinning it out as a separate team (e.g. the A9 team, Kindle...) but it might be that he thinks like a VC and backs everything that looks interesting instead of letting the bureaucracy kill it, and hindsight is 20/20...

Arnt• 11 years ago

A memo was published (or leaked?) in which he said, abbreviated and misquoted: "Our internal services shall be robust enough to sell as services on the big bad internet. Assuming friendly callers is a firing offense."

"Why not sell it" is a bit of a joke. Before you can say that, you have to have a platform that's designed to handle unfriendly users. Users who may be presumed to attack each other and the platform. Setting that up doesn't happen by accident.

lubos• 11 years ago

There was another essay from Steve Yegge some years ago where he was comparing Amazon vs Google (he worked for both companies) and how Amazon completely transformed themselves into using internal APIs as the only method of communication between teams within the company.

Yegge has recalled an email to all Amazon staff where Bezos outlined new Amazon rules. This was in 2002.

1.) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

2.) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

3.) There will be no other form of inter-process communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

4.) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

Especially the last point of the memo is very telling because it shows that Amazon was planning to externalize artifacts of various teams within Amazon at least 4 years before AWS was actually born.

Pamar• 11 years ago

Here the full Yegge tale (or at least a publicly available copy): https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

InclinedPlane• 11 years ago

Also, they had to move to a SoA because they stopped being able to link the whole site on one 32-bit machine due to memory constraints.

xyproto• 11 years ago

After reading the article, I am left with the impression that Steve Yegge was mostly wrong.

qznc3• 11 years ago

I'd say he was correct on #3, #6, #7, #8. That is 4/9, because #10 was just a joke. So he got roughly half of it right, which is not too shabby.

anc84• 11 years ago

A flipped coin could have gotten that same fraction. ;)

jsmeaton2• 11 years ago

Do you not consider #1 to be at least close to accurate? Instead of XML we got JSON databases (NoSQL) which are very popular in some circles. They definitely do not surpass the number of relational database installations, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they stored more data in absolute terms.

jayvanguard5• 11 years ago

Yes, the blog author was pretty generous. He got almost everything wrong if you're being at all critical.

The smartphone market is at least 5 years out. 3 years later iPhone comes out and defines the market. Saying it didn't get really, really popular for a year or two is misleading. If you were betting on the market being _at least_ 5 years out you would have missed that boat.

robin_reala2• 11 years ago

Steve’s best prediction for me has always been his bet on JS in ‘The Next Big Language’: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.co.uk/2007/02/next-big-language.... . This is pre-V8 but post- open sourcing of Tamarin.

davidroetzel2• 11 years ago

I remember being very intrigued by the article back in the day and I revisited it at least twice to find out if steve ever confirmed what language he was writing about.

Today people seem to take for granted that the NBL was in fact javascript, but I still cannot find any source for this.

Does anyone know more and can point me in the right direction?

robin_reala2• 11 years ago

OK, fair enough, but there aren’t any other obvious contenders that fit his criteria. Also, ES4 was in development at the time and would have been a major overhaul to the language (something we’re now getting in ES6).

Maybe I am taking it for granted though…

yellowstuff• 11 years ago

He gave a talk not long after the initial post where he said something to the effect of 'You guys, NBL is obviously JavaScript!" I think I saw it on YouTube at the time, not sure if it is still available.

amelius• 11 years ago

If you ask 1000 people to predict 10 coin flips, then there's a 62% chance that at least one of them is right.

rfrey• 11 years ago

If you ask 1000 people to ask a coin to identify the major trends in a complex ecosystem and make inferences about their future course... they will look at you oddly.

pekk• 11 years ago

They don't have to ask the coin. They can just assign different meanings to heads and tails, flip the coin, and record the result as a prediction. If you have 1000 people do this, some of them will appear to be miraculous predictors just by chance. It doesn't matter whether they are talking about major trends in a complex ecosystem, or whether they believe they are performing inferences. Sometimes a correct guess is just a guess which turned out to be correct, rather than evidence of prophecy.

qznc3• 11 years ago

I try to avoid making predictions. It’s a no-win proposition: if you’re right, hindsight bias makes it look like you’re pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong.

If you are right, then you can point people to your correct predictions. If you are wrong, then silently delete the records or just let people forget about them.

toyg2• 11 years ago

Yegge has always been worth reading, which makes it sad that he's been basically silent ever since 2012 (about a year after the infamous "Platform" rant).

Earth to Major Yegge, Earth to Major Yegge, do you copy? Come back, we miss you.

jayvanguard5• 11 years ago

+1 would read more.

saucetenuto• 11 years ago

That famous Platforms rant was supposed to be Google-internal, right? Implication: he's still writing, but you have to be a Google employee to read it.

Google really does have the best benefit program in tech.

EDIT: I'm kinda joking, and kinda not. Maybe it seems silly, but this really will be on my mind next time I hear from a Google recruiter.

toyg2• 11 years ago

In a way, this validates the "ghost town" argument about G+. There might be tons of wonderful content in this or that "circle", but hidden away it just loses any appeal.

kyrra• 11 years ago

Link[0] to the platform rant for those wanting to see it. He then posted an "oops" post publicly[1].

[0] https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

[1] https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV...

aleem• 11 years ago

I don't know when I gleaned it but it was definitely a culmination of my time at Microsoft, that building a platform is one of those painfully obvious things that everyone should be doing. I wrote a rant about it in 2010[1] thinking I was just putting out the obvious for lay persons.

WordPress has some really horrible backward compatibility baggage but the largest reason for it's success is that it's a platform. Being a platform is as simple as having an API to let others build on top. The platform API is like a bag of seeds that lets everyone do their own gardening using your seeds. This builds an ecosystem.

Accessibility when it comes to Platform APIs is also best illustrated with a simple example and should be clearly obvious to anyone who used jQuery, Prototype and the ilk. At the time jQuery offered method chaining and which other JS frameworks did not. And it also offered some really simple and well-named convenience methods.

    $('#foo').append('OK!').show();

...returning 'this' in functions to allow method chaining was a light bulb moment for me after I saw how well jQuery did it. The jQuery plugin ecosystem stands on its own merit.

The great thing about building a developer platform is that it leads to an ecosystem of apps and plugins. And the great thing about an ecosystem is that it gets you venerable developer talent on a truly global scale.

I recall having a discussing many years back about why Microsoft enterprise licenses were mostly available only through certified partners. It struck me at the time that Microsoft was handing out 15%+ commissions for no reason while it could have adopted Apple's direct selling model. It turns out Microsoft had essentially build a retail platform where being a Gold partner unlocked top margins. You could find Microsoft certified partners everywhere. And this built an ecosystem. These certified partners were cross-selling and up-selling Microsoft products to no end, layering their own support on top and pushing for 3-year release cycles so the stream of money would get renewed vigour.

[1] http://aleembawany.com/2010/08/23/platforms-strategy/

mdemare• 11 years ago

Really miss him. I even read his posts on subjects I didn't care about, like Borderlands or Emacs. Read them all the way through too, sometimes more than once.

aswanson2• 11 years ago

Me too. Something about his stream-of-consciousness meandering just kept me going for the ride.

swah2• 11 years ago

Me too - that one about the "gun collectors" I only skimmed when posted, but then gone back recently for a closer read. And I enjoyed it.

xiaoma• 11 years ago

I agree. His writing was excellent. Along with John Carmack's .plan files, PG essays and Joel Spolsky's blog, he had a huge influence in me really getting into programming.

_steve_yegge_• 11 years ago

Howdy! Boy, HN is terrible at recovering old accounts, so I made this new one.

I just posted an update to the predictions post, with my own scores. Take a look!

As far as blogging goes, I've been on a bit of a hiatus. There's been a lot to learn. The tech world is moving so fast! I've been in Google Cloud Platform for the past 3 years, and next year I hope to start blogging about the experience, and about the technology in general.

For now, though, I'm busy both with my day job at Google and with various personal projects, so there's not much to report just yet. I promise I'll be back someday. :)

aswanson2• 11 years ago

Good to see you're good Steve. You're welcome here anytime.

sokoloff• 11 years ago

I just posted an update to the predictions post, with my own scores. Take a look!

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ten-predictions (convenience link)

jsmeaton2• 11 years ago

Definitely my favourite tech writer. I occasionally head back to read some rants and have a bit of a laugh. Let's hope we see some more in the new year.

PaulHoule• 11 years ago

I'm amazed he didn't predict that pot would be legal or decriminalized in many states.

helper• 11 years ago

The reference, for all those who think this comment is off topic, is a blog post by yegge in 2009 entitled "Have you ever legalized marijuana?"[1]

[1] http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2009/04/have-you-ever-legali...

jdminhbg2• 11 years ago

That's fun to go back and re-read now. He correctly describes "Shit's Easy" Syndrome, but maybe there's an opposing fallacy that's heavily status quo biased. Legalizing marijuana is in fact pretty easy, as bureaucratic undertakings go. Lots of his "what ifs" only make sense for something that's illegal in the first place -- What if illegal smugglers just pull up on the beach and start selling coffee? Why would they do that if you can just stop in at Starbucks?

wtbob• 11 years ago

I was really sad that Lisp didn't take off like it appeared it might in the early 2000s. With Practical Common Lisp[1], Yegge's articles and Edi Weitz's software[2], as well as other articles and resources available at the time, it really looked as though the programming world was beginning to get why Lisp is such a good idea.

And then the focus became JavaScript, which has all of the bad and many—but not nearly all—of the good points of Lisp, and one key differentiator: it runs in the browser, on effectively every computer, tablet and phone on the planet.

Maybe the Lisp-compiled-to-JavaScript efforts will help.

[1] http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/

[2] http://weitz.de/lisp.html

swah2• 11 years ago

You just gave me a great idea: I'll just call Javascript "Lisp" internally, and be glad that Lisp is everywhere.

mkozlows• 11 years ago

The move in the center of intellectual gravity from Java/C# to Javascript puts me in mind of Guy Steele's quote about Java, back in the day: "We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp."

I think Javascript moves those Java programmers halfway further to Lisp. And while the Common Lisp revival movement sort of petered out, Racket (which is honestly much better than Common Lisp to my tastes) is still trucking along and might be poised to be the next step for a generation of programmers who've absorbed the Javascript mindset.

dragonwriter• 11 years ago

And while the Common Lisp revival movement sort of petered out, Racket (which is honestly much better than Common Lisp to my tastes) is still trucking along and might be poised to be the next step for a generation of programmers who've absorbed the Javascript mindset.

While I personally like Racket quite a bit, I think that the Lisp most posed to pick up the JS crowd is Clojure/ClojureScript.

OTOH, maybe instead of a Lisp we'll get another halfway-from-where-they-are language for the JS programmers, and continue the Zeno's paradox of Lisp readiness...

hyperpallium3• 11 years ago

Interestingly, for all his insight, Steve Yegge doesn't understand why Java is popular and lisp is not.

zeveb• 11 years ago

Interestingly, for all his insight, Steve Yegge doesn't understand why Java is popular and lisp is not.

What do you think are the reasons? Some folks might claim that Java enables mediocre teams of mediocre programs to turn out mediocre code, while they would turn out utter dreck in Lisp (we know that excellent programmers will turn out excellent code in Lisp, but there are business and operational risks associated with a small team of excellent programmers), but I don't actually know if that's true. Has research been conducted with large teams of mediocre programmers with mediocre management, using Lisp?

hyperpallium3• 11 years ago

I don't know, hence my diplomatic silence. :-)

I think it's to do with predictibility: back-compatibility, discoverability. You can get new coders who can get up to speed on a codebase. Business customers - who really really want things to keep working - value that. And business customers ultimately decide what is used. Similar to your point. BTW I'm not even sure expert lisp programmers can easily maintain their own code (or, perhaps more importantly, would want to).

Operator overloading: very cool, nice for matrices, complex numbers etc. But easily abused to create impenetrable code (you must first get across all the definitions). C++ had it, Java avoided it. Lisp is so flexible, it's like everything is an overloadable operator.

I'm not aware of such research on lisp; but the only successful lisp projects I've heard of are with hot-shot coders. BTW: reddit was originaly written in lisp (inspired by pg, who gave them the idea for reddit); they switched to python.

sbov• 11 years ago

Let's be real: most people who make fun of Java aren't using a Lisp, and would also make a mess of themselves if they had to program in one.

We use Java at work. Obviously all of the following depends upon your use case.

The main reason we continue to use Java is probably legacy reasons. We have lots of library code. And we're a small shop, so every extra language we program in has a real cost associated with it.

The stability and backwards compatibility is great. We have some libraries we haven't had to touch in almost a decade, being used in apps we just wrote last week. Of course some of them we've updated to use newer Java libraries (such as java.time and java.util.stream in Java 8).

IMHO Java's biggest problem is the community. It's a bit enterprise-y. As long as you don't get caught up in that I think you're OK.

I think the other problem was it went so long between Java 6 and Java 7. With Java 8 there isn't a lot from the likes of Python and Ruby I miss anymore.

For imperative languages, I generally like Go and Python better, because I find them "funner". But once I get past myself, meh. I do think Go gets things a bit more right than Java, but not enough that it merits switching the language we use. Maybe if we had zero code and had to start out fresh.

wiremine• 11 years ago

Totally unrelated, but I saw Steve present at OSCON probably 10 years ago, and it was amazing to see him present on his feet:

The video for his presentation was totally messed up, so his slides didn't load up. He just said "screw it" and went on presenting from memory to a room of around 4,000 people.

He nailed it.

Afterwards, Tim O'Reilly said he had never seen anybody deal with something like that and do as well.

If you get the chance to see Steve present, go for it. He's thought provoking and entertaining.

raldi• 11 years ago

Here's the link to the video (2007), though the site is down at the moment: http://blip.tv/play/AZPiFQI.html

ersii• 11 years ago

Unfortunately, blip.tv is gone. There's no sure indication that all the content will be migrated, but the odds are low - there was a lot of content at blip.tv. Luckily, most of it is archived and being uploaded to archive.org and will be available sometime.

insulanian• 11 years ago

Sure, Mongo may lose your data, but it’s easy to set up and use.

Umm... I'm probably too old, as I feel anger when I read something like that.

ajankovic• 11 years ago

I think it was meant as supportive argument to "popularity contest". So that statement is probably sarcastic in nature.

seiji2• 11 years ago

They built a multi-billion dollar company on that proposition.

As long as it runs on startup, it ships. Any problems can be addressed by paid support contracts (suckers).

jayvanguard5• 11 years ago

Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010

Let me lay the raw truth out for any lisp fans. It will never be popular or widely adopted. Ever.

It has been around for half a century. At no time was it ever widely adopted. It was always just pushed by a small group of fanboys.

That said, I love it and have learned a ton from as have many others.

jayvanguard5• 11 years ago

P.S. Haskell is the new lisp. See you in 50 years when people are still predicting it'll get big anytime now.

nickbauman2• 11 years ago

Never? Why will it never be popular or widely adopted?

jayvanguard5• 11 years ago

Because 40 years ago people were convinced it would be popular one day. And 30 years there was roughly the same percentage of highly convinced, vocal people who thought so. And 20 years ago same thing. 10 years ago ditto.

I mean, what is going to take? 10 more years? 20? At what do you conclude that a language really isn't useful for general purpose programming? (not to say it isn't brilliant and useful for specific purposes, learning, etc.)

100k• 11 years ago

Yegge's "It's not software" from 2004 has a nice bit about microservices -- pretty ahead of the hype curve on that one:

What if every "API call" were hosted by a different server? Well, you'd have a lot of flexibility in fixing any given call without needing to impact clients that don't use it. And it'd be easier to distribute it over multiple machines — it seems like it'd be a better design than the BEA WebLogic design, which is to run a few copies of your MonolithService on each of a handful of machines. There would be new problems to solve, but who's to say it wouldn't be a better design overall? We won't know unless we ask the question.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/its-not-software

kar1181• 11 years ago

There's a comment at the bottom of his original predictions blog, and it reminded me immediately of Alan Kay's 'pop culture' quote

"We work in a fashion industry, and marketing really matters.".

I don't know if I am getting older, but this rings very true to my ears, especially today.

_cbsz• 11 years ago

Re: predicting the Rise of JavaScript, it's a lot easier to be right if you know about V8 a year before public release. From "Rule #3: Performance" on http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.ht...:

Generally speaking, NBL will have to have a much greater focus on performance than so-called "scripting languages" have had in the past. I mean, if it's really the Next Big Thing, it'll have to run on mobile devices, game platforms, and all sorts of other hardware-constrained devices. It sounds impossible, I know. But it's not. Those compiler writers are a tricky bunch, and they have decades of experience. A bunch of them got together and did a lot of head-scratching over NBL, and the result is going to perform quite nicely.

tacone• 11 years ago

If you can afford it road-map wise, starting with the easy details and postponing the hard stuff works sometime. When the easy things are done, the hard things sometime become less hard, and the project got itself more rewarding so it's easier to see it in a good light.

Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record

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