I doubt Swift replaced much besides other compiled languages, and Kotlin just compiles to Java anyway. Dart's VM idea was dropped so its small usage is largely compiling to JS still.

I would say that the overall idea of performance being traded for programmer time is definitely happening despite the emergence of Rust.

Like yeah, you can make an interpreted dynamic language that's pretty neat, but you can also make something like go, swift, or Julia that jits and also captures 90% of that ease of use while significantly reducing your hosting costs/energy consumption.

Going forward I think static compiler inference will be the future of language design. Either for safety like in rust or for convenience like in swift.

And we can already see pitfalls in the interpreted world of python where the wrong implementation, like using a loop instead of numpy, can lead to devastating performance impacts. Looking forward, something like this seems as outdated as having to manage your 640k of executable space in DOS: an unreasonable design constraint caused by the legacy implications of the day.

My prediction is 10 years from now we'll look at interpreters and language VMs as relics from a simpler time when clockrates were always increasing and energy was cheap.

I think the prediction still had a kernel of truth to it though - every edge that chip manufacturers and JIT developers can give us has been burned away on slower and slower client-side rendering frameworks.

We're adding more and more cores, but more cores don't help you write a program in easy mode. Easy mode doesn't multithread.

I mean, that’s not entirely wrong — Besides JS, Python is arguably the most dominant language across all domains. Python is also faster than Ruby, though, and 3.x added static-like features to the language. It doesn’t seem like there’s much appetite for languages any slower than what we have now.

and golang (Go)

But, nobody is paying attention to it. Some of that is because of the Perl 6 baggage, but just as much is probably because this past decade was so heavily entrenched in proliferation of the web-cloud-mobile paradigm that new scripting systems weren't part of the hype cycle. If it didn't get the backing of the FAANGs, it didn't register.

I can imagine a day coming where scripting shines again, though. It might actually be closer than we think. There is always a need for glue code, and glue code benefits from being a kitchen sink of built-in functionality.

https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/Home/Reports

My favorite is the joke that Zuck will buy Portugal.

Nadella’s excellent pivoting of MS into a cloud and services focused company saved Microsoft from a stagnant or declining state.

I can totally picture new languages as described doing well today if we had exponentially more single threaded processing power/watt at our disposal than we actually do.

I think there is still opportunity for languages that offer huge leaps in expressiveness w.r.t handling concurrency even at the cost of raw single threaded performance. Though I would not label a language like that as "slower" as it'd allow us to actually make much better use of our computing resources than we reasonably could today without blowing through most of our complexity budget, resulting in faster programs in practice.

I don't know about that. ChromeOS did grow slowly, and has gained significant share of the entire US education space (K-12). Yeah, it's a niche market. But I think that fits the for "certain market segments" qualifier.

> (Virtual worlds will remain niche, but WoW will pass 20 million users, a Facebook-like game or similar will pass 200 million users) Wrong.

This is technically wrong, but in-spirit correct. Virtual worlds / MMO games did get the traction claimed, just not WoW specifically. (The MMORPG FF14 Online has ~20 million users, MMO Warframe has 50 million registered users, 'facebook-game' Farmville has 73 million users, and 'or similar game' Fortnite has 250 million registered users). Minecraft holds similar numbers.

And while WoW itself never quite hit those numbers, a different game from the same studio did. Blizzard's Hearthstone has over 100 million registered users today.

> This was already true in 2010, so it doesn't even count.

This definitely wasn't true in 2010. On June 1, 2010, Steve Jobs proclaimed that the post-PC era had arrived, and was promptly ridiculed for it by the industry and media. Massive social changes caused by mobile phones have only occurred this decade, as the gig economy has exploded and places like India have 10x'd the number of citizens with internet access.

>> For any definition of 'success', there will be more tech startups reaching that level in the 2010s than in the 2000s. For example, there will be more than four startups of Youtube/Facebook/Twitter/Zynga proportions.

> Wrong.

Huh? Of those 4, Facebook in 2009 was the most valuable at $10 billion. Now there are 20+ private unicorns with that valuation, as well as dozens more that have IPOd in the last few years. How is that prediction wrong in any way, shape, or form?

>> Hence, starting up will become a more attractive career option, though well-meaning family will still say "at least finish your degree first".

> Wrong.

>> An international deal, of the kind that was aimed for at Copenhagen, will be reached over the next five years, though it might not be far-reaching enough to limit warming to 2 degrees in the long-term. (Despite the failure of the Copenhagen talks, it appears that world leaders almost universally recognize the need to take action over man-made climate change, though the various political problems will remain hard problems). China may not be part of such a deal, though the US likely will. Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action.

> Wrong.

Again, this is correct. The US did enter the Paris Agreement, and has not actually formally withdrawn yet as it is not legally eligible to do so until November 2020. "Environmental disasters will begin to increase through the decade, as will disasters that are probably not caused by anthropogenic global warming but will be blamed by it anyway; this will provoke more of a push for action." is an especially cogent prediction.

>> China will not become a democracy, or even make moves in that direction. However the rule of law will strengthen, and some civil liberties will increase. Internet crackdowns will continue, and may increase in severity, and will still be rationalized by porn.

> I want to say the civil liberties situation in China is the same, but I don't know enough about China to comment on it.

Civil liberties have likely gotten worse, but the rule of law has indeed strengthened. Internet crackdowns being rationalized by porn is also correct, as seen in the UK and elsewhere.

As far as ChromeOS and video games go, maxsilver covered those pretty well already.

And yet, people regularly think "a decade is a long time, surely this trend will be finished by then". Recognizing that existing trends are still likely valid is worthwhile.