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Comment by pippy | Hacker News Reader

>ending support for 32 bit apps >deprecating openGL

My opinion on APIs have gone from new and bleeding edge to 'support it till the sun burns out'. Computers and meant to work. on linux or mac, no executable over 5 years old seems to work. But if download a .exe from the early 90's on a PC, it often just works.

In 100 years, the windows API and .exe are going to be the lingua franca of programs. there are many indications this is happening, valve baking WINE into steam, the fragmented package managers on linux, and no common runtime environment taking off.

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Why would that be the case instead of programs following power/popularity like natural languages do? After all the lingua Franca of the world isn’t French anymore, despite its romance origins and therefore high “backwards compatibility” with Latin.

Curiously enough, “Lingua Franca” doesn’t refer to French.

Windows is a desktop OS, and the desktop is dying. In 100 years I’d say the chance of anything running Windows would be about the same as the likelihood of it running VMS.

Laptops and 2-1 are the new desktop, and the large majority runs Windows.

I love my MacBook Pro. Really, I do. And chances are, I'll probably use some iteration of a PC (in this case, I use an eGPU so I could replace my desktop entirely) until I, well, stop using hardware. I also use macOS and Windows on it.

That being said, I will eventually die. Now, the question becomes what are the people that follow after me going to be using. I have kids in school: both use Chromebooks for school work, in one case a PS4 for gaming, and hand-me-down iPhones/iPhone SEs for social, gaming, and the like. Could they eventually need a PC? Possibly, depending on their career path/interests and the level of support for iPads, Chromebooks, etc. at the time. But they don't need it now. And I know people who are my age and older who limit themselves to iPhones/iPads for technology beyond the TV. None of these things are running Windows.

Chromebooks are an US school phenomenon, hardly spotted anywhere else.

I can only speak for the US market I guess, but they haven't found a real need for a PC/Mac outside of what a Chromebook can do, so at the end of the day, I don't feel it bodes well for PC/Mac long term.

I'm a developer at work for internal applications (and some external). All of my non-server running things are web applications. They could be accessed by Chromebooks instead of the hp Windows 7 laptops we use now. I doubt we'd switch off PCs due to familiarity at the very least, but we don't need them.

Even including laptops, sales are declining.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/272595/global-shipments-...

Of course they are declining, nowadays I can keep a laptop for 10 years and still be productive as on the day I bought it.

The day of replacing a PC tower every 3 years are gone.

The sales of smartphones on the countries where pre-pay is the way to go are also declining.

In 100 years, the chance of anything running any contemporary software is zero (outside of museums). Except, maybe, for some old piece of Cobol on a banking mainframe.

and lisp code, don't forget that decades old lisp code (sometimes) runs with no changes on current lisp implementations.

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