What’s in Store for 2010? A Few Predictions | Hacker News Reader

What’s in Store for 2010? A Few Predictions

redmonk.com

38 pointsypavan10 comments

A lot of the comments are bashing predictions as fiction, linkbait, etc, but I like predictions. They are the only way to really measure the vision of an individual. Perhaps not the only way, but a good way. I takes understanding, imagination, realism. Science fiction writers are not only lauded by the imagination of their stories, but the plausibility.

I personally like making predictions. That's what our industry is all about. That's what science is all about. Predicting the future.

That said, I don't see anything particularly insightful in the predictions made in the linked article.

> a.) might lend themselves well to cloud and cloud-like environments and b.) are receiving disproportionately more attention relative to their erstwhile competition are Clojure and Go.

This one is easy. Lisp is going absolutely nowhere beyond appealing to curious mathematically-minded undergrads and researchers. Pure functional ideas and Lisp have been supposed to make a big comeback for what, 20-30 years? The generation that learned CS through SICP in their first year of university have utterly rejected Lisp as a practical production language. Now the generation that is learning with Python and Java is going to think it's the great new thing?

Go is "going" nowhere soon, since:

1. The performance isn't nearly good enough yet. It's going to need to be better than languages like Java and C# to even have a plausible niche.

2. No exceptions and generics right now is an absolute show-stopper for essentially all potential users, purely and simply.

3. For the spaces that C currently occupies, C works just fine.

I think Go is going to find a home with network services that need better parallel processing than is generally managed with C.

Sure, it'll probably still be a science project next year. But I don't think it's as dire as you're suggesting.

You could be right on both counts. Obviously.

Still, I do think it's at least plausible that significant changes in environmental context might lead to different adoption and uptake patterns. Languages not excepted.

Witness the revitalization - relatively speaking - of Erlang as the market fetishized scale-out at the expense of scale up.

The specific criticisms, I think we mostly agree on. I might nitpick on the performance question or the idea that C works fine with respect to Go or the outright dismissal of Lisp dialects, but they're arguable at worst.

That said, I think the trend, and history, both point to the addition of new languages to the toolkit. These seemed like pretty reasonable guesses based on the current intelligence, but maybe your objections are - as you argue - simply insurmountable.

I'll be interested to see what happens next year.

Because I'm told it's not obvious, I am the author of the originally linked piece. Just to ensure full disclosure.

I'm frankly surprised that it got linked to at all, actually.

Prediction is just fiction without the artistry.

my random prediction Crunch pad will come out but will soon be put out of biz by the APPLE TABLET

The one thing I know about the future is that the predictions are wrong.

Ahh the year is almost over. Here come the predictions for 2010 posts that are pure linkbait.

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