Something pg said over on reddit

programming.reddit.com

1 point·abstractbill··2 comments

I had a microcomputer when I was nine years old, in early 84. I was a bit late with email too (92 I think), but I was certainly using the web in 95 (my first real job was in the summer of 96, writing a web-based vertical search engine for British Telecom - I remember being disappointed I wasn't doing something more futuristic, so the web was old news to me by that point).

My only problem with this is all the things that I wasn't aware of at all until completely non-technical friends told me about them. I'm thinking of stuff like hotOrNot and MySpace particularly. Perhaps pg's comment applies at a higher level - broad technologies, rather than the uses to which people will put them?

In any case, I'd be really interested to know what people here are using today that they think everybody else will be using years from now...

I was a latecomer to most of those technologies. I didn't get my first computer until I was 10 (1991), and didn't start using e-mail regularly until 1996 or so. Was an early adopter for the web though; first encountered it in 1993, using Lynx, and also used Mosaic and Netscape 1.0 in 1995.

I think that the technologies you end up being an early-adopter of is mostly determined by luck, who your friends are. I wonder if PG has a FaceBook or MySpace account, or Twitters away, or plays Second Life.

"In any case, I'd be really interested to know what people here are using today that they think everybody else will be using years from now..."

Functional programming. It really does make that much of a difference. I'm a Haskeller by hobby, and my startup is Python-written-in-an-FP-style. I'm finding that almost all of my bugs are type errors, and I never get usually-much-more-common state or logic errors.

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