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We have not seen any theoretical breakthroughs in over 20 years anyway. Unlikely programming is going to change fundamentally. But there is a lot of game chang

by sklogic 11y ago

We have not seen any theoretical breakthroughs in over 20 years anyway. Unlikely programming is going to change fundamentally. But there is a lot of game changing practical advances which totally overturned the way we design systems. Microcontrollers are powerful and dirt cheap now. Low end FPGAs are more accessible than ever. GPGPU is a dramatic game changer, and it is dead easy to use it these days. RAM is nearly infinite. SSDs are cheap and fast. 1gbps networks are everywhere. CPUs have dozens of cores. So, yes, on a practical side everything changed.

mbrock 11y ago
Yeah, practical and cultural shifts determine how the theoretical foundations come into play. Ten years ago, if you said you were into functional programming, most people wondered if you were crazy and why you didn't just program in a real, normal language. Fifteen years ago, garbage collection was considered slow and mostly only suitable for "scripting." Twenty-five years ago, there was Haskell, Erlang, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, and so much cool technology and visionary ideas. For most of the time since, it's all been considered weird, fringe, academic stuff. The past decades of industrial talk about best practices and methodology doesn't seem to have been wildly successful, and now we're looking at other ideas in a diverse way. So it's an interesting time.
- Roboprog 11y ago
  Slight nitpick: I would have said "20 years ago" about garbage collection. As soon as Java came out, full GC (vs ref count) somehow became OK. Disclaimer: Java programmers get jobs, so I am one. My feeling about it is "The elegance of C++ at the speed of a Lisp". Fortunately, we are starting to get better language front ends which can reuse the old JVM binaries, as well as having a GC-ing VM that has had decades and $millions thrown at it.
- Roboprog 11y ago
  I hear you on the FP part, though. Forget "higher order functions" and such, just the idea of "pure function" was hard to get across to some coworkers 10 years ago. "Why would you want to trace the dataflow through the routines, as a pipeline, rather than just whacking on the DATA DIVISION, er, beans / instance variables, as needed???"
- nly 11y ago
  The matters from each era you mention haven't become any more agreed upon... the hype bubbles just evaporated and reformed elsewhere. Nobody became wiser, the landscape just changed. And, you know, it's probably more interesting to look at the landscape than the architecture anyway. The 70s brought us computing, the 80s brought us networking, the 90s brought us eCommerce, the 00s brought us social and mobile. I don't think anyone has a clue what the next broad stoke is.
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Maybe no grand increase in wisdom, but I would say there is a more diverse interest in languages and paradigms, which probably has downsides too. But, like, on my last three jobs I've worked with Haskell, Ruby, and now Clojure and Elixir. The proliferation of alternative databases seems like a part of this trend too. At least in the startup world, right now we're not so bound to a legacy of serious boss-approved technologies. So I'm talking about the landscape of development, if you will... Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages" is about how he and Robert Morris knew back in '95 that in a web startup you could use whatever language you wanted, and I think that came into play in a big way in the '00s. I speculate that Ruby + Rails had a pretty big impact, and then also there was just this generational wave of internet nerds, and a big upswing in open source infrastructure, and some other factors... Hey, while I'm speculating! I think the basic shapes of collaboration-type apps are kind of settling to the point where technologies will come out that eliminate much of the coding drudgery. This is an old dream, of course, and it comes in cycles—like, maybe a truly excellent framework for modern real-time web apps will stabilize, and the year after everybody will be in virtual reality and the whole paradigm changes again. But if you look at the structures of "social and mobile" apps, there are some common denominators that we still reimplement tediously all the time. Users who have relations with each other and other entities, via various permissions. Distributed resources modified with different consistency properties. Timelines, searching, embeds, comments, notifications, and some other things. So what if you took a bunch of clever people with experience from projects like reddit, SoundCloud, Instagram, Airbnb, Slack, or pretty much any social thing, and gave them a couple of years to dream up an architecture that would make all their jobs easier, and that they could maintain as an open source framework? Maybe throw in some theoretical experts to help tease out elegant abstractions and semantics. I think something like that would make sense for YC Research, even if it's not as radical as, say, extending life spans. Because how much of the YC-backed developer workforce is right now sitting around hacking their own thing for real-time notifications? How much more efficient would these startups be if they could configure a mature system declaratively and get the basics, cross-platform, like you could get the basics for a CRUD app with an hour of Rails configuration? Anyway, that turned into a long semi off-topic rant. It's just one incremental step I see on the horizon.
foreigner 11y ago
Decent version control! Continuous integration!

by sklogic 11y ago

mbrock 11y ago

Yeah, practical and cultural shifts determine how the theoretical foundations come into play. Ten years ago, if you said you were into functional programming, most people wondered if you were crazy and why you didn't just program in a real, normal language. Fifteen years ago, garbage collection was considered slow and mostly only suitable for "scripting." Twenty-five years ago, there was Haskell, Erlang, Common Lisp, Smalltalk, and so much cool technology and visionary ideas. For most of the time since, it's all been considered weird, fringe, academic stuff. The past decades of industrial talk about best practices and methodology doesn't seem to have been wildly successful, and now we're looking at other ideas in a diverse way. So it's an interesting time.

Roboprog 11y ago
Slight nitpick: I would have said "20 years ago" about garbage collection. As soon as Java came out, full GC (vs ref count) somehow became OK. Disclaimer: Java programmers get jobs, so I am one. My feeling about it is "The elegance of C++ at the speed of a Lisp". Fortunately, we are starting to get better language front ends which can reuse the old JVM binaries, as well as having a GC-ing VM that has had decades and $millions thrown at it.
Roboprog 11y ago
I hear you on the FP part, though. Forget "higher order functions" and such, just the idea of "pure function" was hard to get across to some coworkers 10 years ago. "Why would you want to trace the dataflow through the routines, as a pipeline, rather than just whacking on the DATA DIVISION, er, beans / instance variables, as needed???"
nly 11y ago
The matters from each era you mention haven't become any more agreed upon... the hype bubbles just evaporated and reformed elsewhere. Nobody became wiser, the landscape just changed. And, you know, it's probably more interesting to look at the landscape than the architecture anyway. The 70s brought us computing, the 80s brought us networking, the 90s brought us eCommerce, the 00s brought us social and mobile. I don't think anyone has a clue what the next broad stoke is.
- mbrock 11y ago
  Maybe no grand increase in wisdom, but I would say there is a more diverse interest in languages and paradigms, which probably has downsides too. But, like, on my last three jobs I've worked with Haskell, Ruby, and now Clojure and Elixir. The proliferation of alternative databases seems like a part of this trend too. At least in the startup world, right now we're not so bound to a legacy of serious boss-approved technologies. So I'm talking about the landscape of development, if you will... Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages" is about how he and Robert Morris knew back in '95 that in a web startup you could use whatever language you wanted, and I think that came into play in a big way in the '00s. I speculate that Ruby + Rails had a pretty big impact, and then also there was just this generational wave of internet nerds, and a big upswing in open source infrastructure, and some other factors... Hey, while I'm speculating! I think the basic shapes of collaboration-type apps are kind of settling to the point where technologies will come out that eliminate much of the coding drudgery. This is an old dream, of course, and it comes in cycles—like, maybe a truly excellent framework for modern real-time web apps will stabilize, and the year after everybody will be in virtual reality and the whole paradigm changes again. But if you look at the structures of "social and mobile" apps, there are some common denominators that we still reimplement tediously all the time. Users who have relations with each other and other entities, via various permissions. Distributed resources modified with different consistency properties. Timelines, searching, embeds, comments, notifications, and some other things. So what if you took a bunch of clever people with experience from projects like reddit, SoundCloud, Instagram, Airbnb, Slack, or pretty much any social thing, and gave them a couple of years to dream up an architecture that would make all their jobs easier, and that they could maintain as an open source framework? Maybe throw in some theoretical experts to help tease out elegant abstractions and semantics. I think something like that would make sense for YC Research, even if it's not as radical as, say, extending life spans. Because how much of the YC-backed developer workforce is right now sitting around hacking their own thing for real-time notifications? How much more efficient would these startups be if they could configure a mature system declaratively and get the basics, cross-platform, like you could get the basics for a CRUD app with an hour of Rails configuration? Anyway, that turned into a long semi off-topic rant. It's just one incremental step I see on the horizon.

foreigner 11y ago

Decent version control! Continuous integration!