Hacker News Reader

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.. ;-)

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

and clojure getting some traction as well...

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?

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

That doesn't really make a lot of sense. Cell phones existed in 2004. So did "smartphones". Really, the only major difference that you could use the word "market" to describe is the notion of a platform for general-purpose mobile computing, the key part of which is a general market for apps, instead of just baked in features on a phone.

I'd think that the iPhone made smartphones mainstream.

> 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#

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

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

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.

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.

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

Wordpress.

#1 - JSON and NoSQL databases?

>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.

Why would you do that?

Because, out of the miniscule market segment of geeks and techs, the tablet fills much of the requirements that people were purchasing laptops for 8 year ago.

Curious, not to be rude, why wouldn't you do that?

The tablet, as we see it today, really wasn't even a thing back when this article was written. Certainly not in the way that it is today. It's been a while since I've been in a 2004 mindset; but, if we consider a tablet as a 'large (as in not phone), mobile computer', then tablets certainly fit the bill. If we're thinking of a laptop as mostly a consumption device, then it still fits the bill. Even now, with the Tablet PCs that are now coming out; as well as all the productivity software that exists on the various tablets (including ssh clients), tablets are continuing to fill the place that laptops used to.