Ten predictions (2004)

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/ten-predictions

by S4M • 13 years ago

457 299 13 years ago

sites.google.com

icemelt8• 13 years ago

Wow some of them are really spot on!

rplnt• 13 years ago

And some are not. Yet?

swah2• 13 years ago

"Important Note: the predictions themselves don't matter! Most of them are probably wrong. The point of the exercise is the exercise itself, not in what results. You should try this experiment yourself — it may show you things you're thinking that you weren't really aware of. And other people might find it interesting reading, even if there are factual errors or whatever"

xiaoma• 13 years ago

This really is an impressive display of foresight. It appears that all the reading Steve mentioned doing paid off. The act of discussing his predictions here on HN is foretold in prediction #6. And those that were off, were still pretty warm.

swah2• 13 years ago

Whoever solves this — i.e. whoever creates AOL for real people, or whatever the heck this thing turns out to be — is going to be really, really rich.

thedudemabry• 13 years ago

I'm similarly impressed. While we can argue about the specificity of several predictions, I can say that I would not have predicted any of them in 2004 other than Programmers Will Be Average and We Will Have A New Online Meeting Place.

jwdunne• 13 years ago

That really stood out for me too. Even more so, the fact Paul Graham is referred to in the prediction just before. PG forms the conclusion of Steve's lisp prediction and also founded a type of community mentioned in the prediction after it.

S4M• 13 years ago

When reading the article, I had the feeling that prediction #6 was actually FaceBook.

ipedrazas2• 13 years ago

same here... Facebook trumps Aol

rdrey• 13 years ago

or Reddit.

kristaps• 13 years ago

That point was one of the easier predictions and vague enough to fit a number of currently popular services, but I'd have to agree that Facebook fits it best.

Samuel_Michon• 13 years ago

Facebook already existed when this was written. HN was just around the corner and fits a lot better, imo. I figured "you and I" referred to developers and entrepeneurs, not the general public.

oinksoft• 13 years ago

Prediction #6 is not very ambitious. The only way several new "internet hangouts" would not emerge would be if the internet suddenly had ceased to exist.

theycallmemorty• 13 years ago

Funny, HackerNews is what came to my mind for that point. I assumed by 'you and I' he meant developers/entrepreneurs/hackers.

If he was in fact referring to the mainstream, then Twitter would be another great example.

GhotiFish• 13 years ago

The ambiguity is helping that prediction quiet a bit, wouldn't you say?

L0j1k• 13 years ago

Impressive.

JDShu• 13 years ago

Prediction #3 is the only one which I can't see being interpreted as being reasonably accurate. Anybody care to explain why it might be correct?

gizmo• 13 years ago

10 years ago I wrote desktop software with UI threads, background worker threads, network layer threads and various helper threads you spawned on a whim. And so did everybody else. Back then the big innovation to multi-threaded programming was the use of RAII Mutexes[1] to avoid livelock/deadlock scenarios.

Fast forward to today. We write complex software for the browser with Javascript front-ends that are completely asynchronous. On the server we have a share-nothing-architecture where hundreds of incoming requests are divided over independent workers. There is still complex multi-threading going on in the database and in the web browser, but most programmers don't have to deal with it anymore. The problem of locks and deadlocks is pretty much a responsibility of the operating system now, much like virtual memory and writing data to the filesystem.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initial...

carbuncle• 13 years ago

We are doing more "multi-process" programming than "multi-threading". Our systems are designed to scale by increasing the number of processes performing the task at hand, more than having one process with multiple threads to increase concurrency.

The programmers try not to think delegate the thread management to the OS, by using multiple processes and MQ in between.

zalew• 13 years ago

> Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010.

these lisp predictions are like the year of linux desktop, aren't they?

hittaruki3• 13 years ago

Status of these predictions in 2013...

1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. What has happened to this idea?

2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. github?

3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. go? node?

4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. clojure? scala?

5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Don't think this happened...

6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. I suppose this happened big time.

7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Thank-god that was wrong!

8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. I am still not paying but am sure a lot of people are.

9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. Hm...

10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average.

tejaswiy• 13 years ago

#1 - JSON and NoSQL databases?

blablabla123• 13 years ago

> XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. What has happened to this idea?

I guess Redis and friends solve the problem "Nobody likes to do O/R mapping".

>5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Don't think this happened...

But a few functional languages more or less made it into the mainstream: Clojure and F#

_anshulk• 13 years ago

#2 probably refers more to heroku than github...

hittaruki3• 13 years ago

You are right, I read his whole description once again... :)

dools3• 13 years ago

Actually I took it to mean more like wordpress.com and WPEngine - ie. things that people can self host if they want to deal with the hassles of it all.

andypants• 13 years ago

Heroku doesn't (necessarily) host open source projects. And Github hosts source code, not applications.

Although Github may be more on the mark here then heroku since it is hosting git.

But I agree with dools, I think this prediction was about services like wordpress.

potomushto• 13 years ago

5. Pretty close: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... lisp #13, scheme #26

wreckimnaked• 13 years ago

and clojure getting some traction as well...

statictype• 13 years ago

7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Thank-god that was wrong!

He wrote this in 2004. The Apple App Store was released in 2009 right?

hittaruki3• 13 years ago

I think he is talking about the actual devices rather than a "market for apps" for these devices.

timc3• 13 years ago

My take on it

1. Well we have the NoSQL bandwagon. Obviously with JSON in a lot of places instead of XML.

2. Well we have GitHub and Bitbucket, but also cloud application platforms and EC2, and Heroku for taking application deployment and infrastructure away from being the pain point it was.

3. Green threads.

4. I would say Java is still the No.1 on the JVM by a long shot and more than 50% but I don't have the figures to back it up.

5. Lisp. I agree, hasn't happened

6. Hackernews, Reddit, Facebook

7. I think he was closed to the mark there. 2009, well there was a complete reinvention when the iPhone was released in 2007 and Android in 2008. Took the networks some time after to get their 3G together.

8. A lot of people are starting to for Google Apps for Enterprise, Google Adwords is still popular as ever, but personally. No.

9. Apple is apparently more profitable, but I don't think there are good figures anywhere for this.

10. Most people are probably around average at.. ;-)

benihana• 13 years ago

>9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. Hm...

If you count tablets as laptops, then yes, way way way yes.

mkr-hn• 13 years ago

Why would you do that?

josteink• 13 years ago

2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. github?

Wordpress.

ipedrazas2• 13 years ago

Anyone willing to write 10 predictions for 2020?

franze2• 13 years ago

1) in 2020 most programmers will still be average

2) in 2020 browsers will support a multitude of programming languages natively, most of them functional

3) in 2020 linkedin will be dead

4) in 2020 there will be a huge governmental campaign to teach kids programming, starting in pre-school

5) in 2020 there will be an SVG that is to SVG what HTML5 was to XHTML

6) in 2020 TV will still be mostly watched in 2D

7) in 2020 Steve Ballmer won't be CEO of SonyMicro any longer

8) in 2020 we will finally have an CSS alternative

Guillaume86• 13 years ago

2) is very optimistic (I wouldn't bet a dollar on it)

8) I'm not sure what you mean with that one, what kind of alternative? (given you seem to exclude transpilers/preprocessors)

mixedbit• 13 years ago

Until 2020 Duke Nukem 5 will not be released.

robinh• 13 years ago

Also Half Life 3.

lifeisstillgood3• 13 years ago

Well, I am going to go and do my predictions for the next ten. Laser guns right up the top !

lifeisstillgood3• 13 years ago

Not sure why I got the downvote - I am serious - Laser guns will change the geo-politics of the world - and business has always followed those changes:

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon

* http://www.csbaonline.org/publications/2012/04/changing-the-...

friendly_chap9• 13 years ago

1. 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. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore.

4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. Not in 2010, not even yet, but we are certainly on the road. No surprise considering how shit Java is.

5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard.

6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. This is such a vague prediction does not even worth mentioning.

7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Happened sooner.

8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. You don't say? They are one of the biggest players out there, even if they are not primarily known for payware but still.

9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God.

10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. This makes no sense, but anyway, we are getting better. Slowly though, version control, more languages, testing is infiltrating even some dumber dev companies too.

I give this guy a mental thumbs up for points 1 and 4, and the cynicism in point 10.

wwwtyro• 13 years ago

2. "hosting open-source web applications" does not really describe GitHub

3. He's not talking about using multiple cores, he's talking about using multiple threads vs (for example) multiple processes.

6. Reddit, Hacker News

friendly_chap9• 13 years ago

2. I think github is the most notable example.

3. Gotta reread that.

6. Oh come on, facebook, youporn, whatever. As I said, too vague.

nos4A2• 13 years ago

I think on point 2, he meant a hoster like heroku or AWS? On point 6, its reddit (BBS for this gen), point 8, google drive, android apps, play store etc, point 9, I think the iPad counts :)

Overall quite spot on i'd say..

seanmcdirmid5• 13 years ago

> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML.

Thank god we dodged that bullet. I'm just glad people see XML for what it really is (useful, but not that useful).

> Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore.

The problem is multi-threaded has never really took off, even with all the cores we have today. There is still no silverbullet to harnessing parallelism.

> Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God.

Apple's profits on laptop sales (not other iOS devices) exceed those of HP, Lenovo, and Dell (everyone else being dead). Apple has been in no hurry to capture the unit shipped crown (and if we count iPads, they are already there).

> In five years' time, most programmers will still be average.

A tautology if I ever heard one.

friendly_chap9• 13 years ago

> useful, but not that useful

+ 1

> Apple's profits

With all respect, I have hard time seeing Apple laptops outside the US. Not counting some fanboys who acquired the taste trough some snob blogs.

Nursie6• 13 years ago

> The problem is multi-threaded has never really took off, even with all the cores we have today. There is still no silverbullet to harnessing parallelism.

MMmmm..... yeah it has. I'll agree on the silver bullet, but I don't think they need one.

Threads are all over the place, and easier than ever to use. They do require intelligence to use well, and people to think about things like locking strategies, but they really are not all that hard. It amazes me that people seem to be so scared of them for some reason.

Perhaps it's the problem domain I work in (back-end server systems) but I come across them all the time. When dealing with lots of distinct tasks for lots of distinct clients you can make good use of threads without needing to do the kind of hard-core mathematical analysis that you would apply to splitting single tasks across parallel systems.

(And no, I'm not suggesting that a one-thread-per-client model is a silver bullet, there are more efficient async ways of doing things)

spatters• 13 years ago

> A tautology if I ever heard one.

It's not a tautology, it's the asymptotic equipartition property.

zeeboo2• 13 years ago

> A tautology if I ever heard one.

Consider this set of programmer "skill levels" where most (80%!) are above average: {10, 10, 10, 10, 1}

wuest• 13 years ago

> A tautology if I ever heard one. In fairness, that statement was clarified: "In five years' time, most [future] programmers will still be average [by today's standards]."

vacri• 13 years ago

A tautology if I ever heard one.

RTFA

B-Con• 13 years ago

Did you actually read what he said?

> Of course most programmers will still be average, by definition. The problem is that the average level of quality and productivity probably won't have changed all that much.

It would appear not.

It's always funny how people take a serious person who has otherwise written a very insightful article, take a sentence out of context, and proclaim it silly.

Ingaz3• 13 years ago

>> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. >Thank god we dodged that bullet. I'm just glad people see XML for what it really is (useful, but not that useful).

XML, JSON, MUMPS-storage are semantically equivalent.

XML is not about "<" and ">".

ghshephard2• 13 years ago

"6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. This is such a vague prediction does not even worth mentioning."

This is one he nailed - Facebook.

dools3• 13 years ago

More like reddit, no? Or hacker news ;)

Wilya• 13 years ago

You could repeat the same prediction every year, and you'd probably be right everytime.

codeulike• 13 years ago

Yeah it may seem obvious to us now that there is one major social network where people use their real names and the total user base approaching 1 billion, but that was not at all obvious in 2004.

a_m0d• 13 years ago

I was thinking more of StackOverflow as an answer to this one.

juan_juarez2• 13 years ago

I'm surprised that he missed MySpace which was active & growing at the time.

ricardobeat• 13 years ago

I thought of Reddit. People don't really "hang out" on facebook, and it's more about friends and family, not communities.

Nursie6• 13 years ago

The XML things is quite amusing, given how far out of favour XML went. XML has now failed hard AFAICT.

But I can agree the spirit of the prediction lives on in the form NoSQL and JSON.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

Has it failed? Or have people just stopped trying to shoehorn it everywhere?

There are cases where XML is a great format. For example in the past I wrote a system for interfacing with a government department.

The thing was an epic of about 30 different schemas, however being able to actually look at a concrete schema for specification and actually be able to test against it was invaluable.

Trying to build that thing with JSON would have driven me to tears.

Ingaz3• 13 years ago

XML is not about "<" and ">" everywhere.

XML, JSON, MUMPS are semantically equivalent.

dools3• 13 years ago

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.

I think he means more like wordpress.com, WPEngine and those ilk. Those are currently the most lucrative, but there are other examples of businesses monetising open source by hosting it.

friendly_chap9• 13 years ago

That's right, much clearer now. And yes, there is indeed shitload of money in that market.

johndavidback2• 13 years ago

I think more specifically he means things like Heroku or Modulus.

JoblessWonder• 13 years ago

I agree. And I think more and more open source web applications are using SaaS "supported" versions in addition to their open source/privately hosted options. I think this prediction is pretty spot on as well.

f1codz• 13 years ago

> Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard.

On contrary, for me this one was one of the strongest predictions. In my opinion, predictions should be taken in spirit and not by letter. Looking at the rise of Clojure, i dare say that was a great foresight.

jonaldomo• 13 years ago

_that_ profitable???

The company I work for pays $250 a year for Github Enterprise per developer for about 400 developers... That is just one company. 100k/year! They are thinking about extending it to all 2,000 developers.

A few months ago they raised $100 million!

derefr• 13 years ago

> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard.

I don't know about hard. I can now imagine a day where Clojure is the predominant JVM language--whereas if you told me five years ago a Lisp would be even as popular as Clojure is now, I would have scoffed.

Now, the by 2010 part is wrong, indeed. But I see these predictions as being more about acceleration than current velocity.

PommeDeTerre• 13 years ago

I think you're overestimating the popularity of Clojure.

While it's not as totally obscure as many other Lisp, Scheme or Lisp-like language implementations, it's not very widely used at all. Its penetration is minimal, even compared to Scala (which has seen much more significant usage, but still pales in comparison to Java).

While Clojure is a step in a better direction, I don't think it's gaining traction all that quickly. There's a whole lot of existing Java and Scala code that would need to be completely discarded or ignored in order for Clojure's usage to be considered as having any impact.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though.

JSON is basically XML with 50% less bullshit. It does less but it does it so much more elegantly than XML - and has the further benefit of a syntax similar to that of structured data in such languages as Javascript (duh), Python and Ruby - that it was a shoo-in to squeeze XML out of most non-enterprise uses, at least on the data transfer format side.

However, to this day most data still resides in SQL databases, which have the net advantages of speed, stability and reliability that come from long lead time. What has changed is that object-relational mapping has gotten vastly better than it was in 2004, so programmers can mostly enjoy the best of both worlds.

There's also the fact that SQL is an easy enough DSL to understand, read and write that it isn't a barrier to use even in edge cases where ORMs fall down.

SonicSoul• 13 years ago

    > object-relational mapping has gotten vastly better than it was in 2004

Maybe so, but it still seems like it's only good for prototyping. With each new version of ORM i get excited and try to implement it, but sooner or later it comes to bite me in the ass, and long term maintenance becomes more painful than not using ORM with all the low level hacks that need to be added and tricky management of the mapping config.

edu222• 13 years ago

Have you tried Django's ORM? From what I understand its not perfect, but for the most part it really rocks.

jimbokun4• 13 years ago

It's true that JSON document databases very closely follow the model set out by earlier XML document databases, and have succeeded for the reason Yegge spelled out.

The big lack is the equivalent of XQuery and XPath, in my opinion. Javascript plays this role in some systems, but I don't think there is anything for Javascript matching the power and flexibility of XQuery/XPath for querying and transforming data.

I would be happy to learn about query languages for JSON document databases that prove me wrong.

corresation3• 13 years ago

JSON is basically XML with 50% less bullshit.

I don't get this. XML has the capacity of being as simple as you want it to be. You don't need schemas, namespaces, xpath, and so on, and can make your XML life every bit as easy as JSON. In many ways easier given that JSON doesn't even have a bloody date or time type.

But if you do want strong-type validation, schemas and namespaces are there for you. If you want an easy, standard way to query, XPath/XQuery are there for you. If you want to wholesale completely restructure entire documents/data blobs, XSLT is there for you.

I have never gotten the hate for XML. I suspect -- and this is not some sort of slur against those who don't like something I like, but rather is an observation about general tech trends -- that many programmers were simply too lazy to understand all of XML, so rather than work in an area where they felt ignorant (again, nothing stops you from making bespoke XML at your desire), JSON and things like it seem so appealing.

mseebach3• 13 years ago

3: He explicitly mentions message passing and multi-process as opposed to multi-threaded, and that's dead on right. F#, Clojure, Scala, Erlang and Node are all approaches to concurrency that doesn't involve the developer dealing with threads.

namdnay3• 13 years ago

And in the enterprise world, everything is managed in the Spring/JMS parts, which handle all the multithreaded stuff for you.

banachtarski• 13 years ago

+1. I thought that prediction was the most impressive one on the list.

dspillett2• 13 years ago

3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore.

A lot of things server-side are moving back towards multiple processes rather than threading, driven by "cloud" based scaling: if you code is designed to handle being spread over many nodes then why complicate things by having two concurrency models on the go at once (threads at host level, multiple processes spread over the hosts)?

8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. You don't say? They are one of the biggest players out there, even if they are not primarily known for payware but still.

While most individuals just use the free service level, you can pay for the use and support of Google Docs and some groups do. Same with Google Drive: while many won't need more than the free 5Gb it costs per month for more than that (if you are using it to store music and video 5Gb isn't hard to fill).

It makes perfect sense in a pointless way: most of everyone are average at everything. As people get better/worse the average shuffles around too. If he is talking about following best (or at least good) practises I can tell you thre are a lot of average people out there despite the tools avaliable to make it easier to do things right.

zanny• 13 years ago

> (threads at host level, multiple processes spread over the hosts)

Concurrent programming isn't all "jump off a cliff into the atomic<T> and mutex lock sea and worry about deadlock or run everything in serial".

There is a middle ground where you take apart the easily discretized parts of your task at hand, that have little or no communication between them, and thread those. For example, if you have a system to scrape a user profile, processing the personal information, hobbies, and pictures in separate threads only requires sending work to threads in a thread pool saying scrape X. That X gets scraped, database calls are asynchronous and work up to the thousands of workers, and you don't even need to wait - pass off the profile, let the threads run and wait for a new connection.

Threaded parallelism only becomes dangerous when you start using shared data. That is where you need to ask if its worth the cost. You shouldn't be afraid of threading entirely just because you can back yourself into deadlock hell if you don't plan ahead.

megablast• 13 years ago

> 9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God.

If you count laptop+tablet sales, it may be close.

sedev• 13 years ago

If you count laptop plus tablet sales and measure by profit share, it's not remotely close: Apple obliterates its competitors by that measure.

kostya-kow• 13 years ago

>5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard.

I don't think it did. Lisp itself didn't become popular, but a lot of functional ideas are being implemented in more mainstream programming languages, and some functional languages are also becoming popular.

pimeys• 13 years ago

I don't think Lisp is a functional language like Haskell is. It's more of a language with no paradigm. You can do objects, you can do pure functions, you can write your own language easily. And the mainstream languages, like Java, C#, Ruby, Python have also been mixing up different paradigms. You have some kind of lambdas, maybe even closures. They rely heavily on objects and having mutability everywhere is still too common.

dudurocha• 13 years ago

In #2 isn't he describing wordpress.com? You see, wordpress is a open source plataform, but people pay money to have their blogs on it.

jodrellblank4• 13 years ago

But he said "a lot of money". Maybe http://wpengine.com/ instead?

dsrguru• 13 years ago

> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard.

Not according to http://visual.ly/most-popular-programming-languages-2013. Clojure alone is in 10th place for code submitted to codeeval.com in 2013.

Edit: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... appears less focused on web development and startups (it puts VB ahead of Ruby and leaves Clojure and Scala out completely) and even this ranking puts Lisp (presumably CL) at #13 overall.

baak• 13 years ago

JSON Databases have passed relational in popularity? I don't know that I believe that.

Anyone know if there's a NoSQL/SQL market share comparison out there?

johnward2• 13 years ago

They are becoming popular but there is no way they surpass relational databases in use.

mattmanser2• 13 years ago

I honestly can't believe this comment is all the way down here. What a bubble we live in sometimes.

I'd be surprised if it was much above 1%.

jimbokun4• 13 years ago

"7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Happened sooner."

It happened June 29, 2007.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

jimbokun4• 13 years ago

"9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God."

iPad.

jimbokun4• 13 years ago

"5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard."

Tiobe has "Lisp" ranked 13, not clear what they included as "Lisp". (Specific Lisps like Scheme, Common Lisp, and Clojure rank much lower, so must be some kind of aggregate.)

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Interestingly, the "Very Long Term History" table has Lisp going from rank 20 in 2008 to 13 in 2012. So Yegge clearly missed his top 10 prediction, but may have been on to something in regard to Lisp increasing in popularity (depending on how much credence you give Tiobe rankings, of course).

lkrubner3• 13 years ago

You are perhaps aware that the Death Of Lisp happened in between the first date and the current date? The Golden Age Of Lisp was during the 1970s and 1980s when the USA Defense Department put substantial funds into AI research, and the favored language for AI research was Lisp. And, to a degree, the Lisp community became dependent on that money. If you look up some of the famous companies that put together Lisp-oriented machines circa 1980, there was the clear assumption that money from the Defense Department would continue forever. However, Communism collapsed in 1989 and from the Reagan build-up of the 1980s to the demobilization under Clinton in the 1990s, the USA spending on the military shifted from almost 9% of GDP to roughly 4% of GDP. There were cutbacks in research spending. And this lead to the Great Death Of Lisp.

However, good ideas are resilient even if the face of death. People such as Paul Graham kept the flame alive. People like Rich Hickey brought it into the modern age. There is no question that Lisp is on the comeback trail.

There is also, of course, the broader victory of Lisp: the impact it has had on all other languages. Paul Graham wrote about that here:

http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html

ctdonath• 13 years ago

1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. Yup, close enough insofar as the point was made but some of the names were changed and improvements applied.

2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. Ya know, he might be onto something there. In retrospect, it relies on fulfillment of #7.

3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. It's just too obvious a technique to not use. Alternatives may be cleaner, but not as clear. "Get it done" trumps "make all the pieces play in perfect harmony".

4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. That assumed robust use of JVM. iOS & Android exploded onto the market, changing the landscape he was addressing.

5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Nope. But I assume he never expected Objective-C would be.

6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. Facebook. EVERYBODY is on Facebook. Wasn't so important that "you and I" use it, but that our mothers would.

7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Odd that he was more predicting something not happening; we'll say he was right insofar as what constitutes "happened" is squishy and took a few years to get going, but wrong insofar as when it did happen it did so to a far greater degree than he expected. Half of the then-absurd snide "promises" he listed as others making have pretty much come true: HDTV pixel counts on a pocket device, LTE data rate 10x faster than T1, etc.

8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. He couldn't grok what Google would be able to offer for free.

9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. Had to invent the smartphone and tablet markets to do so, but insofar as an iPhone 5 is on par with notebooks back then, we'll count this as a big win.

10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. More a tautology than anything. What's "average" is pretty friggin' capable given a cheap modern toolset. For $99 and a Mac darned near any competent idiot can whip up a practical app and have it available to the world in a few days, no need for mad skillz.

The thing about predictions is the difficulty of articulating how discoveries along the way will affect manifestation of the prediction. One may be right in the spirit of the prediction, but not the letter thereof.

slashclee• 13 years ago

> Half of the then-absurd snide "promises" he listed as others making have pretty much come true: HDTV pixel counts on a pocket device, LTE data rate 10x faster than T1, etc.

Shame we still don't have microsecond latencies, though.

ajross• 13 years ago

Actually 4 is almost entirely backwards. He's saying that Java the language will be less popular than other JVM languages. That's not true at all. Obviously what actually happened is that the Sun/Oracle JVM dropped below 50% market share of "VMs that run Java", losing badly to Google's Dalvik. Java-the-language remains dominant on both, however.

mstachowiak• 13 years ago

Just for edification - regarding #2, GitHub is insanely profitable.

Taylorious• 13 years ago

@your answer to number 4

How do you see the market share dropping? There is this little thing called Android...

callmeed• 13 years ago

>> 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.

My initial thoughts on #2 were AWS and the PAAS companies (Heroku, EngineYard, etc.) but maybe they're to broad to fit. The people who mention WordPress have a good point.

huxley• 13 years ago

9. I agree it's a miss but since then:

* Gateway was bought at a firesale price by Acer

* IBM sold off their PC business to Lenovo

* both Dell and HP have been in the doldrums in terms of PC/laptop sales and they both desperately have tried to milk the enterprise software and services business

Apple's total revenues come to about 69% of the combined revenue of HP, Dell, Acer and Lenovo ... so a miss since the iPhone/iPad have been what boosted Apple rather "laptops" per se (and certainly not to complete equality in revenues by 2010), but it's an interesting miss.

PakG1• 13 years ago

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.

It must be. Github raised 100m from investors led by Andreesen Horowitz in 2012. You don't get that kind of funding from that level of quality investors without a seriously good financial trajectory.

jliptzin• 13 years ago

Therefore, Andreesen Horowitz prefers not to make risky investments.

T-hawk• 13 years ago

> 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore.

What that prediction missed was that Moore's Law finally broke down for single-threaded performance. Single cores got only about 3x faster from 2004 to today, rather than continuing the historical trend with four more doublings. Moore's Law is alive and well but now requires parallel architecture to exploit. But you can't blame an armchair pundit for missing this one. The 3 GHz clock speed barrier was hardly something a layman could have predicted; it's an artifact of extremely sophisticated manufacturing processes and infinitesimally detailed subatomic physics. A layman couldn't have said whether the physical limits of clock speed would be reached at 1 GHz or 100 GHz and in 2005 or 2025.

> 6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent.

This succeeded way more than anyone thought. More than "you and I", our moms and grandparents even hang out there. It is Facebook.

jodrellblank4• 13 years ago

Here's a 6.6Ghz overclock: http://www.custompcreview.com/news/intel-core-i7-3770k-overc... with liquid Nitrogen cooling.

So how much is it a room-temperature a physical limit, and how much an economic limit?

martinced4• 13 years ago

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 uncontested winner in the ultra-thin laptops market.

Granted, there's a market for IBM Thinkpads but you simply cannot say he was far off regarding is Apple laptops prediction.

dgudkov• 13 years ago

Premium products almost never dominate in global markets.

AdamFernandez• 13 years ago

I believe number 6 accurately describes Facebook, which in November of 2004 may not have been on his radar as fulfilling this role.

buzzkills• 13 years ago

I'm sorry he got (1.) wrong. Let's be really generous and say that he means databases that aren't relational (which is totally different from XML database), even by that definition I'd argue that there aren't more people (developers) using Non relational over relational. How about end users, yes probably more users, but even in 2004 more people were using non-relation databases than relational (file systems, LDAP, Lotus Domino, VSAM, IMS, AD). So perhaps you could interpret surpass to mean 'better than', well that's just vague.

dspeyer2• 13 years ago

> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though.

NoSQL still stores tables, not trees (or at least the NoSQLs I've paid attention to do). That's the change he was predicting. You still need a tabular schema for your NoSQL database.

emn133• 13 years ago

Hmmm - not really. You're storing complex object(or document or xml or json). In other words, you're not using the db schema to destructure your model, but just using it to get at the bits you want.

It's close enough in essence.

suyash• 13 years ago

@friendly_chap: No surprise considering how shit Java is.

You must be a shitty developer for hating on Java. Didn't you read thru the article about how useful and awesome Java is. The worlds top websites, mobile apps heavily run on Java and JVM.

ville• 13 years ago

> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard.

It peaked[1] in 2010 and is now settled on the 13th place, so I got to give him some credit for this prediction. If you include other dialects including newcomers such as Clojure, we might be talking at least close to the 10th most popular.

[1] http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Lisp.html

coldtea3• 13 years ago

>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.

Err, that prediction talks about something like Amazon AWS and Heroku, which very much happened. Not about hosting open source CODE.

>3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore.

Nope. Multi-threaded programming he talks about has long fallen out of favor. Multicore programming in 2013 is all about message passing, STM et al --where threads are hidden from the programmer.

>5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard.

If you count Clojure, it didn't fail that bad. But the general trend towards functional programming and its concepts means that the prediction sort of have been proven true, despite Lisp not being the language that brought it.

>6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. This is such a vague prediction does not even worth mentioning.

Are you kidding me? This is all about Facebook, before there was facebook.

>7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Happened sooner.

Well, the iPhone appeared on 2007, so not that much sooner. And he is correct that the whole market exploded a little afterwards (the first iPhone wasn't even 3G, remember?).

>9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God.

Actually not that off. Especially if you include the iPad: http://photos.appleinsider.com/deutsche-120206.jpg

And even without it, Apple has 1) that exact share of profits (of all those others combined), 2) that share of the high-end (> $1000) market.

>10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. This makes no sense

Makes no sense? If anything it's an absolutely true tautological statement, mathematically speaking.

nehz• 13 years ago

I believe point #3 describes a paradigm shift from thread-based programming to a more event-based approach (which still uses threads/co-routines) rather then implying that everything will be single threaded

eloisant• 13 years ago

Considering that Lisp failed to get to the top 10 between 1958 and 2004, it was pretty dump to predict it would suddenly rise to the top.

friendly_chap9• 13 years ago

Predicting that a language without a type system is the future is pretty dumb in itself.

I give y'all an other one: "cars without brakes are the future".

stewbrew• 13 years ago

I simply assume that with "type system" you mean "statically typed language" since lisp is strongly typed, which implies having a "type system": bigloo & typed racket demonstrated that static typing & lisp/scheme aren't incompatible. That prediction was rather unlikely to come true, anyway.

experiment0• 13 years ago

Well Lisp is dynamically typed and Javascript, Ruby and Python seem to be doing pretty well.

wcchandler• 13 years ago

Brakes are a complete waste of energy...

cdf• 13 years ago

Well, not sure about cars, but bicycles without brakes are getting pretty hip...

bnegreve• 13 years ago

Well Clojure is actually a lisp dialect, more generally speaking, functional programming languages get more attention nowadays than back in 2004. Since 2004, we have F# Clojure, Scala was released in 2003.... Considering how hard it is to predict the future, I would say it is a pretty accurate prediction.

mcgwiz• 13 years ago

(General response to a trend in the comments.) I believe #2 refers to things like Wordpress.com or CloudFoundry.com. Wikipedia.org might qualify as well. If Discourse.org offers hosted instances, (and they make a lot of revenue), they could qualify too.

As far as I know, GitHub never opened their source.

raylu3• 13 years ago

Yes, but GitHub makes a lot of money by hosting something that is open-source: git.

lipeno• 13 years ago

Lol, I remember reading this :)

cekstam• 13 years ago

Any reason for it not beeing in the web archive?

http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://sites.google.com/site/s...

qompiler• 13 years ago

10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average.

Most programmers are average, that's the definition of average. It's like saying in five years most people will still be average.

yen2232• 13 years ago

"Of course most programmers will still be average, by definition. The problem is that the average level of quality and productivity probably won't have changed all that much." -- from the article.

vincentkriek• 13 years ago

Well, not really. If we look at programmers by skill level and number that skill level from 0-9. If you have 100 "5ers", than the average is 5. And yes, than most programmers are average.

If you have 50 "1s" and 50 "9s", the average will still be 5, but no one is average.

Then again, I don't think that is what he meant.

moron4hire3• 13 years ago

On the Lisp thing, looking around the programming world in 2004, you didn't see proliferation of functional concepts like you do today. In those days, "functional" meant Lisp, at least popularly. I think the big lesson of Lisp has been disseminated, though, and that is that it is more productive to write code-that-writes-code.

But I also think we learned a broader lesson that it's better to not pigeon-hole people down into a single paradigm. So what if Company A uses only the functional bits of your language and Company B uses only the object oriented bits, thus making their code "incompatible". Their code would be incompatible even if they could 100% agree on programming paradigms, naming conventions, API patterns. Because programming is so much NOT the syntax of the language, as long as it is not specifically restrictive.

stiff3• 13 years ago

Being a "Lisp" is a very broad category and I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language. I would love to see a list of things that are today considered functional that originated in Lisp, I think there is not that many of them in the end. However, there is a ton of things that have nothing to do with being functional that originated or got popularized by Lisp: garbage collection, lists as the fundamental data structure, dynamic typing,... One could just as well consider it the first "scripting" language, a spiritual predecessor to Python, Ruby, maybe Smalltak to a extent? Many Lisp dialects do not stress the functional part all that much and lots of Lisp code is written in a way that is very imperative. In the end I think many other factors contributed much more to the popularization of functional programming.

And if you take Common Lisp as an example of a Lisp, there are still tons of interesting things that are far from being mainstream. Multiple dispatch, conditions system, macros, ...

bcoates2• 13 years ago

I think the common programmer considers first-class functions and closures as 'functional' features. This is from the bad old days when procedural languages didn't usually have these things.

martinced4• 13 years ago

..."I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language"

Even more interesting: why do people call a family of language a language? elisp, for example, certainly doesn't put the emphasis on FP. But Clojure does (although you can use Clojure in a non-functional way).

But it's not that much of a surprise: nowadays talks about FP are everywhere, so programmers who think they understand FP use the term for everything.

For example you can have Excel spreadsheet having cells which shall always update themselves automatically from the network: like a cell containing the current date. Or a cell containing the current exchange rate between this and that currency.

Yet recently on HN in every single thread about Excel you had armies of retards explaining that "Excel was the ultimate functional programming language".

People are really that retarded. Even on HN. And it's frankly sad.

nessus422• 13 years ago

> Being a "Lisp" is a very broad category and I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language.

I don't understand how anyone who has studied programming language history could not understand that Lisp, and APL to no small extent, are the languages that initially defined what it means to be "functional".

Scheme, which is a hugely influential dialect of Lisp, is unambiguously functional, and Lisp in general is clearly derived from lambda calculus, which is the origin of functional programming.

justin_vanw5• 13 years ago

To whom did 'functional' mean the same thing as 'lisp'?

I'm always astonished when people conflate these two things. Lisp encourages you to put the forms that evaluate to a value in the position you would otherwise put a variable that has been set to that value, sortof code in place. That is kindof like functional programming. However, lisp does not avoid side effects or mutability, in fact virtually all operators in lisp are either destructive or have a destructive equivalent. The destructive equivalents are there because if you are limited to the nondestructive versions only you can't implement lots of algorithms without doing a bunch of consing and copying. In lots of ways it is easier to implement a performant functional language if it is pure and without side effects, because you can make strong assumptions everywhere.

Lisp was much more interesting 10 or 20 years ago than it is today. Today, most languages have stolen most of the good parts of Lisp. Strong but dynamic typing (or the gross weak but dynamic typing), pass by reference only, generic data structures, garbage collection, first class functions, ability to introspect objects at runtime, and most other features it pioneered are just taken for granted in modern languages. What is left as an advantage is the lisp syntax, and advantages that come from that, such as data-as-code and therefore powerful macro systems. That is also the main disadvantage to lisp, as much as people will claim that eventually you can see through it, I have never seen anyone do math either on paper or on a whiteboard in anything but infix notation. There are infix and postfix calculators, but I have never seen a prefix calculator.

TLDR; Lisp isn't really that functional unless you use a restrictive and inefficient subset of the language.

stiff3• 13 years ago

You are also not getting the point you complain about completely clear, it is not that "Lisp isn't really that functional", Lisp != Common Lisp and being a Lisp and being functional is to some extent orthogonal those days - Clojure is a very functional Lisp for example, similarly Racket, Common Lisp much less so. The original McCarthy Lisp paper was to a large extent a paper in theory of computation, using Lisp as a vehicle for things like proving program correctness, so that Lisp was purely functional, otherwise you could not do much formal reasoning with it. I guess to be completely clear one has first to define what one means by "Lisp".

moron4hire3• 13 years ago

That's an interesting point about infix and postfix calculators but no prefix calculators. Though I wouldn't go so far to say there aren't any, I feel pretty sure I've seen one before--though don't care enough to go looking--they do seem pretty rare. I wonder what lisp/scheme/whatever-I-need-to-say-to-get-you-to-stop-being-pedantic would look like with post-fix evaluation.

polskibus• 13 years ago

standard hindsight bias

tomasien• 13 years ago

Crazy to see someone talking about PG in 2004 that way (see comments section). I assumed that comment must have come from an HR'er in 2004, but nope. Apparently it was just someone talking about PG and LISP on the Stevey's blog in 2004. Weird.

tocomment• 13 years ago

Does 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.

columbo• 13 years ago

> how it was going to revolutionize everything

I think it did.

The Java->XML->XSLT->HTML or Java->XML->Webservice framework was pretty big news in 2001. It meant you could transfer data between any number of services using the same data set. You could take that XML and send it to a java servlet or you could render it to html using xsl and give it to the users. You could also flat out dump XML and have other services use it. It was the first generally accepted webservice standard done over http.

Before XML exploded information was transferred between companies (that I worked for) by moving CSVs around, then putting the csv into the database, then reading the database back out... compared to that xml was an absolute godsend.

johnward2• 13 years ago

I still use XML/XSLT daily.

rwallace• 13 years ago

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.

mmiliauskas2• 13 years ago

One weird thing. Site is hosted in sites.google.com, and content is published on 2004, however Google sites launched in 2007, which came from acquisition of JotSpot, which was launched in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sites

mmiliauskas2• 13 years ago

My bad, JotSpot existed in 2004, so this might be legit. Spooky accurate predictions though..

llimllib• 13 years ago

Back in the day stevey rehosted his blog on 3 or 4 different blogging services IIRC.

bjhoops1• 13 years ago

This is really impressive. Soooo close on the XML database thing - just substitute JSON (which hardly anyone knew anything about in 2004) for XML and he nailed it. Just one great call amongst many here.

bradshaw1965• 13 years ago

10 year, very lightly hedged, mostly specific prediction is hard. Pretty good job, I think.

kushti• 13 years ago

# 6,9,10 are ok. Other predictions failed

snarfy• 13 years ago

3. Multi-threaded programming

With threads as the complexity grows you basically re-invent the OS kernel/scheduler inside your app. You might as well use the real kernel. Multi-process is the way to go.

justin_vanw5• 13 years ago

Lisp 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 to explain things. Look at all the infix notation: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_car_...

Otherwise, this is pretty spot on. I would say that XML databases should be replaced with JSON or schemaless databases (there was no json back then) and then this prediction is spot on as well.

larrywright• 13 years ago

Clojure is a Lisp and has been rising in popularity. I don't know if it is in the top 10, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was in the next few years.

diego• 13 years ago

It's #23 on Github, ahead of Go and Erlang. I think top 10 is a tall order but not impossible.

https://github.com/languages/Clojure

lkrubner3• 13 years ago

I got a new job in December. This company mostly uses Ruby and PHP. I was given an assignment for which they scheduled 2 weeks. I wrote the whole thing in Clojure, my new favorite language. I got it done in 1 week (6 days). After I was done, I asked if it was okay if I used Clojure. The folks I work with had no problem with that. They asked were impressed with my speed, part of which I attribute to Clojure.

I am the first person in this company to use Clojure, (although there is a small team in London that now uses Scala, and there is an official goal to move toward JVM technologies). I use it because it lets me work very fast. I have spent many years writing Ruby and PHP. I used to use them because I thought they were fast, and Java was slow. But one's point of reference shapes one's preferences.

Let me put it like this: I started using PHP in 1999. At that time, I felt strongly that this was the easiest way to write web apps. Java was verbose. The Struts framework was monstrous to the point of being offensive. Perl was ugly. I had never heard of Ruby. I became an evangelist for PHP, trying to convince companies that its use would make web development much more pleasant and faster.

Later I did some Ruby On Rails development. I like this language, though I have never understood the smug sense of superiority of some Rails developers, especially in their attitude toward PHP. In my mind, these are 2 similar languages with slightly different strengths and weaknesses, but at roughly the same level of power.

PHP was for a long time a Wild West of development. Every developer built their own CMS and then used it for everything. At some point after 2006, this changed. Ruby On Rails was a huge influence. By 2008, the only jobs I could find, for either Ruby or PHP, were using monolithic frameworks: Rails, Symfony, Drupal or Cake. I found myself bogged down reading endless documentation. I recall losing whole days trying to track down a bug in Symfony and then finding it was because of a setting in an obscure YAML file. The situation was not as bad as Struts, but I felt that somehow the world had taken a wrong turn. Once upon a time lightweight scripting languages offered freedom from Java and Struts -- and when you make that comparison, both Ruby and PHP seem like heaven. Bruce Eckel summed up the spirit of the change here:

"But for someone who has invested Herculean effort to use EJBs just to baby-sit a database, Rails must seem like the essence of simplicity. The understandable reaction for such a person is that everything they did in Java was a waste of time, and that Ruby is the one true path." http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312

To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons:

1.) the language

2.) the eco-system

The 2 work in combination of course.

When I got done with my 2 week assignment, which I did in 1 week, I ran "lein uberjar" and gave a single binary to the sysadmin, so he could roll it out to the production machines. He asked where the other files were. I said "There are no other files, all the HTML, CSS, Javascript, images and code are in this one file." He asked how to start it. I gave him a simple 1 line startup command. He started it up and was amazed. He said, "That's it?" I said, "That's it." He said "Why can't they all be this easy?" He was used to dealing with complicated Capistrano and Jenkins commands for roll-outs.

To me, Clojure has that simplicity, speed and elegance that I was looking for in 1999, when I stumbled on PHP and decided PHP was the wave of the future.

I suspect the Great Age Of Lisp is still ahead of us. Stuff like Clojure makes me think there is a vast potential here, still waiting to be unlocked.

justin_vanw5• 13 years ago

So, if I were to do your two week assignment in one day, in C, would that mean that C is much better than Clojure?

What if I gave your Sysadmin a make file that would build a Debian package or RPM package rather than expecting him to maintain some complex and silly deployments system? The sysadmin would be my new best friend, but would that imply that the language I used was better?

You are doing some seriously sloppy thinking here.

rntz• 13 years ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see any infix notation on the linked page.

justin_vanw5• 13 years ago

(car x) == (first x)

(car nil) => NIL

Shouldn't they say, for example:

(eq (car x) (first x))

Sure, it's the same, both imply a test for equality or in this case an assertion of equality. However, '==' is not part of this language and there is reason to use it other than the alternative is less obvious and clear.

pg2• 13 years ago

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 not saying for sure we are. Even after all these years, I still can't say for sure whether ordinary programmers will ever be able to deal with prefix notation. But I also don't feel it's safe to dismiss the possibility.

ScottBurson• 13 years ago

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.

habosa• 13 years ago

This is a pretty incredible list of predictions. I'm not just impressed at how 'correct' some are, but also that these predictions turned out to be so important to the tech industry.

It's interesting how everyone has a different take on #2. When I read it, I thought of Heroku and I think that's pretty close. With the git integration many people do `git push github && git push heroku` which is pretty cool.

As fir #10, that's not good news for all of the "Rockstars Only" job postings.

raylu3• 13 years ago

I think github.com is the best example of #2.

epa• 13 years ago

Good insights.. he was right on a lot of stuff.

martinced4• 13 years ago

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 ; )

jonpeda6• 13 years ago

ahem.

https://www.google.com/search?q=being+the+averagest

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averages...

Mahn• 13 years ago

Thank god JSON has taken over XML. I'm sure XML still has its uses, but it simply is way too verbose, and frankly I have yet to find a data structure which representation fits better in a xml like format (besides html, obviously)

clarkmoody• 13 years ago

Wow, I really was expecting at least one of these comments to have meaningful discussion of each of his predictions with facts/figures. Instead, half of the comments are arguing about Lisp and the other half about XML / JSON.

shitlord• 13 years ago

> Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010.

Every time I hear that, I always think of "abcd will be the year of the Linux desktop". I want it to happen, but at the same time, I realize how absurd I am being.

interviewer• 13 years ago

Steve Yegge is usually a talented and entertaining writer. Having said that, his strengths lie in writing about computer science and far less in actually creating real systems. These predictions aren't very good (as time as shown) and are on par with the poor judgment he exercised in bashing his former employer in a 'private' post.

bhaik• 13 years ago

Impressive.

zero445• 13 years ago

wow,some of them were really true.

philsnow2• 13 years ago

I 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 or want to sell out, and generally unlikely to ever be vulnerable to a buy-out.

When making investments of any kind in an entity that is made up of individuals, I'm increasingly wary of the cupidity of those individuals. Very soon I'm going to have to decide whether to send my kids to private schools or public schools (and switching costs are high, so I want to get it right the first time), 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.

jonpeda6• 13 years ago

> 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.

philsnow2• 13 years ago

> 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.

jonpeda6• 13 years ago

> Heck, they'd probably like someone to outsource their email, too.

2004 -- Was this before or after Gmail launched on April 1?

Ten predictions (2004)

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