We need less Rails, Node.js, etc. and more systems research | Hacker News Reader

We need less Rails, Node.js, etc. and more systems research

4 pointsjfe8 comments

My opinion: Too many people stitch together crap built on top of HTTP and call it revolutionary. We need to abandon, or at least migrate from, stale web technology, and pursue fundamentally new ways of computing.

But it seems the trend is toward keeping with what we have; kids leave school wanting to do nothing but write iPhone apps, built on technology created by men who are better than them.

Do the world a favor, and get smart enough to dig us out of this complacent hell-hole that is Web X.0.

View on HN

The trend toward keeping with what we have is often mistaken as zero progress when in reality it is more a trend towards massive evolution. If you can't look past the "iPhone app era" how do you expect new students to? Should all students be forced to have PhDs in AI/Distributed Computing/Quantum Mechanics?

The problem of kids leaving school wanting to write iPhone apps seems to have nothing to do with computing at all. It seems to have everything to do with "Get a career, make it rich, find a nice job, get married, have kids, retire", which for a large majority of the population is all that maters. So it isn't so much a computing problem as it is a societal problem. I imagine your rant could swap out a few words and be used as a rant against every single academic and industrial industry that exists today.

But, at the end of the day major companies with major dollars are building self driving cars, space ships, virtual reality. Oh and they are also buying companies that contain only talented people for millions of dollars to do research. The fact that the economic landscape is pumping out computing literate students seems to only be a good thing, regardless of their intentions.

And yeah, the web and most of its products still suck. But that has little to do with the technology. If you can't realize that then maybe you need to get a bit smarter.

> and pursue fundamentally new ways of computing.

Do you have any examples or ideas regarding that new way of computing? I'm not even sure I understand that phrase.

Maybe you meant new way of interacting?

And why do you mention both backend technologies, phone apps and web itself? Those are entirely different things that may rely or interact with each other, but they are not the same.

not so much interacting, as harnessing computing resources. plan9, though not terribly popular in the mainstream sense, introduced very simple and effective methods of distributed computing. the engineers broke away from the TCP model and developed their own transport protocol for super-fast data transfer. i personally want to see more of this.

I think this is a natural path of software development. It is getting easier and easier every year to make software on the foundation built by smart engineers.

There still will be engineers that will do amazing things, but the problems the engineers will face will be harder and the problems programmers will face will be easier.

Just compare creating a blog with php year 2000 and creating a blog with rails 2014.

I believe that in a near future making most of the apps used by businesses will only be a matter of setting configurations. I know this is what people said in the 80s and we did not get there by 2000, but that dose not mean we will not be there in the future.

yes, perhaps i should have titled this rant "we need fewer programmers and more engineers" :)

Are you going to pay for it?

This is the key. Technological progress follows the money.

Do us a favor, and stop telling us what to do and do it yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com