What's the last truly new thing you can think of? I'm interested because I am young (22) but have studied programming language paradigms and history and I also agree a lot of "new" stuff is old.
The webcrap world is mostly churn, not improvement. Each "framework" puts developers on a treadmill keeping up with the changes. This provides steady employment for many people, but hasn't improved web sites much.
An incredible amount of effort seems to go into packaging, build, and container systems, yet most of them suck. They're complex because they contain so many parts, but what they do isn't that interesting.
Stuff we should have had by now but don't: a secure microkernel OS in wide use. Program verification that's usable by non-PhDs. An end to buffer overflows.
IMO Machine learning mostly doesn't work (yet) with a couple exceptions where tremendous amounts of energy and talent have made that happen. For example, image processing with conv nets is really cool, but the data sets have been "dogs all the way down" until very recently. And for the past few years, just getting new data and tuning AlexNet on a bunch more categories was an instant $30-$50M acqui-hire. Beyond a few categories, its output amuses and annoys me roughly equally.
But the real problem with ML algorithms IMO is that they cannot be deployed effectively as black boxes yet. The algorithms still require insanely finicky human tuning and parameter optimization to get a useful result out of any de novo data set. And such results frequently don't reproduce when the underlying code isn't given away on github. Finally, since the talent that can do that is literally worth more than its weight in gold in acqui-hire lucky bucks, it doesn't seem like there's a solution anytime soon.
Voice input? You gotta be kidding me. IMO it works just well enough to enter the uncanny valley level of deceiving the user into trusting it and then fails sufficiently often to trigger unending rage. Baidu's TypeTalk is a bit better than the godawful default Google Keyboard though so maybe there's hope.
GPUs? Yep, NVIDIA was a decade ahead of everyone by optimizing strong-scaling over weak-scaling (Sorry Intel, you suck here. AMD? Get in the ring, you'll do better than you think). Chance favored the prepared processor here when Deep Learning exploded. But now NVIDIA is betting the entire farm on it, and betting the entire farm on anything IMO is a bad idea. A $40B+ market is more than enough to summon a competent competitor into existence (But seriously Intel, you need an intervention at this point IMO).
Machines with lots of CPUs: Well, um, I really really wish they had better single-core CPU performance because that ties in with working with GPUs. Sadly, I've seen sub-$500 consumer CPUs destroy $5000+ Xeon CPUs as GPU managers because of this, sigh.
Container systems? Oh god make it stop. IMO they mostly (try to) solve a wacky dependency problem that should never have been allowed to exist in the first place.
The web: getting crappier and slower by the day. IMO because the frameworks are increasingly abstracting the underlying dataflow which just gets more and more inefficient. Also, down with autoplay anything. Just make it stop.
One of my favorite features now on my iPhone is "Reader View". Have a new iPhone 7, which is very fast, but some pages still take too long to load, and when it finally does, the content I want to read is obscured with something I have to click to go away, and then a good percentage of the screen is still taken up by headers and footers that don't go away. The Reader View loads faster, and generally has much better font and layout for actually reading the content I'm interested in.
All of which is to say, the sole purpose of what a lot of web developers are working on today seems to serve no purpose other than to annoy people.
Just a week ago I made the startling discovery that FB's mobile web app it's actually worse than a lot of websites I used to visit at the end of the 90s - early 2000 on Netscape 4.
Case in point, their textarea thingie for when you're writing a message to someone: after each letter push there is an actual, very discernible lag until said letter shows up in the textarea field. So much so that there are cases when I'd finished typing an entire word before it shows up on my mobile phone's screen. I suspect it's something related to the JS framework they're using (a plain HTML textarea field with no JS attached works just fine on other websites, like on HN), maybe they're doing an AJAX call after each key-press (?!), I wouldn't know. Whatever it is, it makes their web messenger almost unusable. (if it matters, I'm using an iPhone4).
My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.
Don't get me wrong, it is amazing progress given the technology you have to fight. But in absolute terms it's not that great.
The great thing about native development is the long-term stability of all the components. I have access to a broad range of good-looking UI components with simple layout mechanisms, a small but robust SQL database, a rock-solid IDE and build tools - all of which haven't changed much in the past decade. Plus super-fast performance and a great range of libraries.
To put it in terms of the article: the half-life of native desktop knowledge is much longer than 10 years. Almost everything I learnt about native programming 10 years ago is relevant now.
Unfortunately, the atrocious deployment situation for native apps is also unchanged in 10 years (ie. "This program may harm your computer - are you really sure you want to run it?"). But on the other hand having a native app has allowed me to implement features like "offline mode" and "end-to-end encryption" that would be difficult or impossible in a web app. This has given my business a distinct advantage over web-based alternatives.
Everything else seems like stuff that makes things better for the developers but not much visible benefit to the user. I can understand where a comment about the web not being much better would come from, on the scale of a decade.
Go back 20 years, and you're talking about a completely different world; frames, forms, webrings, and "Best viewed with IE 4.0". But if '96 to '06 was a series of monumental leaps, '06 to '16 looks like some tentative hops.
Few websites use them effectively yet, at least in a way that benefits the consumer (several are using them to benefit marketers). This could be because developers don't know about them, consumers don't care about them, or perhaps just not enough time has passed. XHR was introduced in 1999, after all, but it took until 2004 before anyone besides Microsoft noticed it.
I think many of us underestimate what was possible to do in browsers. What has happened is that these features have been democratised: what took them months to build I can now pull of using WebRTC in the space of a weekend.
The thing is - the polish matters. You can't do viable consumer apps until they actually work like the consumer wants, which is often decades after the technology preview. You could emulate websockets using IFRAMES, script tags, and long-polling back in the late 90s, but a.) you'd get cut off with the slightest network glitch and b.) you'd spend so much time setting up your transport layer that you go bankrupt before writing the app.
They're taken for granted in native application programming, yes, but the big advantage of browsers is the zero-cost, on-demand install. This is a bit less of an advantage than it was in 2003 (where new Windows & Flash security vulnerabilities were discovered almost every day, and nobody dared install software less their computer be pwned), but there are still many applications where getting a user to install an app is a non-starter.
Ditto. I like having a copy of a program that no one but me has access to modify, and I like that I don't have to rely on my ISP to use my computer. If I like a program, I don't want it to change until I choose to change it. I don't want to be A/B tested, marketed to, etc. I'd rather buy a license and be happy =)
And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now. In fact, I'd say that "open link in new tab" is dead on most of the new web "applications", I'm actually surprised when it works. The same goes for the "go back with backspace" thingie, which Google just killed for no good reason.
Copy-paste is also starting to become a nuisance on lots of websites. sometimes when I try to do it a shitty pop-up shows up with "post this text you've just copied to FB/Twitter" or the app just re-directs me to somewhere else. It reminds me of the Flash-based websites from around 2002-2003, when they were all the rage.
Use the basic HTML version. It's worse in a few ways but better in most others. Including speed.
Back with backspace!
On top of that I actually have no "CMD" key on my keyboard, I have a "Ctrl" key which I assume is the same as "CMD" (I also have a key with the Windows logo which I had assumed it was the CMD key, I was wrong). KISS has gone out of the window long ago.
The outlook Web app on the other hand sometimes blocks backspace from deleting a character, presumably to stop you inadvertently jumping back from inside a text field. This is only "on" when inside a text field in the first place, so if MS could do it, I don't see why Google's better engineers couldn't.
> The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago.
What's laughable is how much effort has gone into rebuilding something in this platform with a result that is nearly the same (but worse) as what existed 20 years ago.
x86 CPUs, web browsers, popular operating systems, and so on are all examples of this problem. At some point I really wish we could do something different, practical reasons be damned. It's sad that as many cool, "new" things we have, some of the core, basic ideas and goals are implemented so poorly and we are effectively stuck with them. This is one reason I hate that almost all software and hardware projects are so rushed, and that standards bodies are the opposite, but with only the bad things carried over. The cost of our bad decisions often weighs for much longer than anyone could imagine, just ask anyone who has designed a programming language or something major in software ecosystems.
As much as I enjoy all the new, shiny stuff, it makes me sad thinking about BBSs and old protocols Gopher that represented the old guard, alternate routes, and the fact that we really haven't come that far. Overall things of course are a lot better, but in many ways I often feel like we're treating the symptoms and not the cause or just going around in circles.
I could go on, but the rant would be novel length.
I don't see any opportunity in the future for any person or company to take all the lessons learned in the last 50 years and build something new that takes it into account.
Same with browsers; It's only now that we kinda know what a browser really needs to be but there's no way to start from scratch with all those lessons and build a new kind of web browser. There is always going to need to be what they currently are and build on what was already done.
I understand why, but it's still kind of sad.
It's almost like saying Microsoft Word is cross-platform because I can RDP into a Windows machine from Linux. It's not really part of Linux, it needs a client to access an application running on a remote server. The only difference is how complex the client is.
The flip side of that equation is that poor practical choices never improve because there will only be more platforms to target.
If we made development decisions based on technological constraints alone, how is it supposed to improve?
Your whole multiplatform thing is disingenuous because back then there really was only 1 platform. Windows. So you've conveniently forgotten about the lotus suite, etc.
I also think you're vastly overestimating how far we've come in that timespan. Like v8 was pretty much 95% of the improvements, simply because you could do more than 1000 loops in JavaScript without killing the browser.
And yet today it is still harder to make a decent web app than it was in VB6 15 years ago.
the that time you had to learn a lot of new stuff in a short time too.
I spent four hours just to find that the latest and greatest express don't have the simple global site protection with a password (that it had in version 3) like with .htaccess - it is just not possible anymore. There were no elegant solutions.
There may be some marginal progress while doing complex stuff, but doing the simple is harder and harder with each passing year.
Here is a simple question - is making working UI now easier than with MFC circa 1999. If the answer is no- than that progress is imaginary.
Every new thing is strongly opinionated, doesn't work and relies on magic. Debugging is nightmare and we have layers upon layers of abstractions.
Please for the love of Cthulhu - if any of you googlers, facebookers, twitterers read this - next time you start doing the next big thing let these 3 be your guiding lights - the code and flow must be easy to understand, it should be easy to debug, it should be easy to pinpoint where in the code something happens - all of the frameworks' benefits become marginal at best if I have to spend 4 hours finding the exact event chain and context and place in the framework that fires that ajax request.
/rant over
iCloud's office apps use Sproutcore, which eventually forked into Ember (though the original Sproutcore project still exists).
Program verification
The whole HTML rendering pipeline with advanced scripting support is really an innovation in itself. The downside is speed, but that's where we innovated the most, VMs for JavaScript.
Hopefully Web Assembly will really show the improvement we've made.
Many of the algorithms we're implementing (or at least considering) only exist in recently published papers, or sit behind unpublished APIs. There have been huge improvements in graph route-finding algorithms in the last decade, so much of it is new, interesting and it's far from run-of-the-mill implementation.
I'm 38 - I spent the first many years of my career doing CRUD development, first in Perl (late 90's), then Java/PHP (2000's). I skipped the JS craze, and now I'm enjoying my work more than ever improving my C++ skills (last time I touched C++ was 98, modern C++14 is a huge improvement) and working on backend, specialized algorithm implementation. It's great!
Experience is the best teacher. Kids don't listen to their parents, new developers don't listen to the greybeards until it's too late. This is the way things are :-)
Sounds great - how does one go about finding that sort of work in the industry?
Late 1970s: microcomputers, explosion of BASIC and ASM development
Early 1980s: proliferation of modems, BBS's become big, Compuserve becomes big- people able to read news online and chat in real-time (but not popular like much later). software stores, software pirating, computer clubs, widespread use of Apple II's in schools. Microsoft Flight Simulator released in 1982 is first super-popular 3D simulation software.
Mid-1980s: GUIs- Macintosh 1984 based on ideas from Xerox PARC.
Late 1980s: Graphics had more colors, more resolution, faster processors. So- cooler games. File servers. 1987 GIF format, 1989 GIF format supporting animation, transparency, metadata- not that popularly used though- was a compuserve thing.
Early 1990s: Internet, realistic quality pictures, webpages/browsing, global file servers. Mosaic web browser. Most pages involved horizontal rule dividers that might be rainbow animated GIFs. Bulleted lists. Under construction GIFs were popular. Linux. JPEG format. Netscape. Blink tags.
Mid 1990s: Windows 95 (with Winsock). IE vs Netscape. IE had marquees. VBScript. (Mocha->LiveScript->)JavaScript. Applets. Shockwave. WebCrawler search. Altavista search. OOP pretty solidly how you should program now with C++ having been around for a while and Java slow but write once/run anywhere and OOP. Apache webserver. CGI: can email from webpage.
Late 1990s: ActionScript. Google search. CSS. Extreme programming. Scrum. JSP. Some using ORM via Toplink. Java session vs. entity beans. IIS. Java multithreading. Amazon gets patent for 1-click ordering. AOL instant messenger. PhP.
Early 2000s: ASP. .Net/C#. Hibernate ORM (free). Choosing between different Java container servers.
Mid 2000s: Use CSS not tables. Rails.
Late 2000s: SPA and automatic updating of content in background via Ajax. Mobile apps. Mobile web. Scala. Cloud computing start. VMs. Streaming video mature. Configuration management via Chef/Puppet.
Early 2010s: Cloud computing standard. Container virtualization. Video conferencing is normal- not just big company office thing. Orchestration of VMs more normal.
Mid 2010s: Container Quantum computing starts at a basic level (not important yet).
Note how I can't really thing of anything recently that has to do with new things in webdev.
> Early 2010s: Cloud computing
1960s: Client/Server Architecture. Big servers and small clients.
> Mid 2010s: Quantum computing
before 1950s: Analog Computers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_computer
There is nothing new under the sun. Analog computers passed away because they were not usable. Ok, quantum computing may be different but their practical use is also questionable.
This is right and wrong at the same time. Right, because the Cloud reuses some basic concepts from the mainframe era (e.g., virtualization), which had been neglected for some time. Wrong, because writing your application to run efficiently on a mainframe is totally different from writing your application to run efficiently on Cloud infrastructure. Also, there is no thing such as small clients anymore, mobile apps and Web frontends are nowadays as complex as the usual 1980s fat-client software.
IMHO this is a very good example for technology not making circles, but evolving in spirals.
This is also right and wrong :-) Right regarding your perception, wrong regarding relative power. 1960s clients were small compared to today's small clients. However, 60s server were also small in relation to cloud servers. Today our small clients provide browsers and stuff like that but they aren't useful without servers. They can't run top-notch 3D games without high-end servers. The third wave of C/S will be in the area of A.I. with (small) clients which will possibly as powerful as today's cloud servers.
Ajax, Long polling, WebSockets
jQuery/MooTools/Prototype, Bootstrap/CanMVC, Angular/React
Javascript debugging tools, profiling, 60fps, responsive pages, AMP
RSS, Web Push, WebRTC
HTTP Auth, Cookies, oAuth, new social protocols
Perl, Java, PHP, Node.js, Go
1. I didn't mean to put "container" in front of quantum computing.
2. I didn't mention history of certs or encryption, as I think that security is often a feeling rather than a reality. I'm not sure that "HTTPS everywhere" plugin and then movement in early 2000s was innovation more than it was tightening up security after Firesheep.
3. Yes, I should've included WebSockets over long polling in Early 2010s.
4. Yes, RSS mattered- 1999/Early 2000s.
5. I probably shouldn't have mentioned OOP, etc. as I didn't mean for methodology to matter, since it doesn't matter to users. Similarly debugging tools don't matter for innovations that users see.
6. Yes, fluid layout, grid layout, and responsive design in Late 2000s (though Audi had responsive in 2001).
7. jQuery/MooTools/Prototype, Bootstrap/CanMVC, Angular/React - none of the implementation details of these things matter. The only things that matter are how things appear to the user- like whether a page has a clunky refresh or smooth transition and whether things update automatically when they are changed elsewhere. Also, Applets, Flash, frames, and the move to JS all screwed the visually impaired.
8. Cookies mattered because they were used to track users in ways they didn't want to be tracked. People disabling JS for a while mattered. US announcing Java was insecure mattered. Flash and Flash being abandoned mattered.
9. Forgot to mention frames in Mid/Late 1990s.
10. As you mentioned oAuth, SSO becoming a big deal in the Late 2000s with Facebook, Google.
And I should have mentioned blogging, microblogging, move of much of the web to Facebook, Tor/private web, peer sharing and impact on music industry as well as impact on the value of well-created data and applications vs. the value of constantly creating data and making data available and clear.
Despite all of the things I missed, the point is that the things that really matter aren't new libraries and frameworks- they are technology and how the world uses it. If a user can't tell a positive difference between something you were doing 5 years ago and today, then you didn't really innovate.