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I'm much more interested in what HN contributors believe to be the emerging tech trends of 2016, particularly in software development. Also if there are any spe

by j_s 10y ago

I'm much more interested in what HN contributors believe to be the emerging tech trends of 2016, particularly in software development. Also if there are any specific recommendations of websites that make these things more discoverable in the future. (Checking GitHub trends every day 'doesn't scale'!)

T-A 10y ago
I don't know about "emerging", but at this point it's impossible not to mention AR/VR and machine learning. Developer Economics highlighted both in their latest report [1] - and that is also a partial answer to your second question, their free quarterly surveys are a good way to keep an eye on tech trends. As an aside, I remain puzzled by HN's hit-and-miss deduplication. Sometimes I submit something and it's caught immediately. Then [2] happens. [1] https://www.developereconomics.com/reports/developer-economics-state-developer-nation-q3-2016 https://www.developereconomics.com/reports/developer-economi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317342
- BatFastard 10y ago
  Not sure about VR, but AR/MR will be huge.
  - cheez 10y ago
    VR will be a niche entertainment conduit not entirely unlike speciality televisions to start, but then the technology will normalize and filter to every home. In 5-10 years, expect VR to be as pervasive as consoles, if not sooner. Though in keeping with the spirit of the post, that's not 2016.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
My few impressions: - WebAssembly and utter dominance of browsers and JavaScript as a development platform. I don't particularly like the latter very much, but it's hard for me to deny it is happening. People are writing desktop apps using Electron, mobile apps are being made as embedded browsers or replaced entirely by websites, and some folks are even making JavaScript (and node.js) work on microcontrollers. - More and more languages seem to be getting REPLs, so maybe - in a few more decades - we'll see something resembling the good development environments of the Lisp Machines time. - Who knows, maybe we will finally decentralize the cloud again? I don't fully understand the things like AWS Lambda, "compute services" and other related buzzwords, but I know the model I'd like to see - where the cloud provides only computing power, and code can be run on data as decided by users instead of users having to give away their data to the owners of the code. I'm not sure if this is how things turn out, but I feel like some components of that better future are being built now. - We'll see an emergence of another job - of people who are something between a developer and a devops, people who "orchestrate" all that god-awful tooling mess of build systems, packaging systems, containers, balancers, fleets, forward-reverse-backward distributed scheduling proxies and whatnot. It's getting out of hand very fast. EDIT: Cloud-to-Butt extension strikes again; I keep forgetting about it when editing posts...
- zxv 10y ago
  I'm not a fan, but there are interesting things happening Javascript even in systems programming. For example, consider Joyent's open-source NFS server in javascript. https://github.com/joyent/sdc-nfs https://github.com/joyent/sdc-nfs
  - jjnoakes 10y ago
    System programming in JavaScript makes me feel queasy.
    - jclulow 10y ago
      Why is that? It's not perfect, but we have a number of vital systems programming facilities available. For instance, we can (through mdb, the debugger, and the mdb_v8 module) inspect all of the Javascript (and native) state in a core file -- all of the Javascript objects, the current stack trace with arguments for each frame, etc. That core file can be taken at our discretion via gcore(1) without terminating the process, or in response to an abort(3C) or unhandled Javascript exception. We also have excellent support for dynamic instrumentation, via DTrace and USDT. DTrace has essentially zero overhead for disabled probes and doesn't require rebuilding, reconfiguring, or even restarting the process in question to start collecting data. We've added DTrace probes to "bunyan", our logging framework, so that we can get TRACE level logs as probe firings without needing them to be enabled all the time. We've also added probes to "restify", the HTTP server upon which we build most of our REST services, so that we can track the invocation of particular routes and handlers. Both of these facilities are vital for chasing down and fixing bugs in production systems, without which many issues would be much harder -- or even impossible! -- to solve. This is especially for the not insignificant class of bugs that _only_ show up in production and are _not_ reproducible. Or the class of bugs that we have hit at most once in a week, a month, a year, or (practically) ever. I'm always on the look out for new languages and platforms that provide these features, but in the mean time we do some pretty solid systems programming work with Javascript.
      - jjnoakes 10y ago
pascalxus 10y ago
Well the whole blockchain thing is part of a slightly broader potential trend: decentralization. We're starting to see social networks that are decentralized: like Dystopia and another more recent one i can't remember the name of. But, I don't think they're catching on - there's not much interest from users. These things basically use client desktops as mini-servers to serve up pages that used to come from a centralized location. In theory, technically speaking, many things could be run this way. The million dollar question is: why should we do this? Where's the value? Are users so paranoid about centralized tech companies owning their content, that they'd be willing to do all this?
- natrius 10y ago
  Decentralized social software allows permissionless innovation on top. Anyone can add new features and release them to users. These networks are less capable and less user friendly today, but they won't stay that way, especially if we find a good way to fund development work on them. Users will choose decentralized software not because of ideology or paranoia. They will choose it because it will be better, just like they chose the open internet over AOL.
  - pascalxus 10y ago
    That's good point about "permissionless innovation". It will be interesting to see where this has the most value and what problems it solves, that can't already be solved by the current incumbents.
clumsysmurf 10y ago
Reversing the flow of information to a few companies that gives them unprecedented power over the people. More specifically, decentralizing the web with things like: * Tim Berners-Lee Solid (store your data in “pods” (personal online data stores) that are hosted wherever you would like but only allow applications you have given permission to access) * IPFS * blockchain These ideas are here http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-we...
shubb 10y ago
Maybe the end of professionalized IT outside of tech companies. I think we are moving towards even non technical teams selecting and administrating their own devices, and getting business done with a selection of SAS offerings. There will still be a need for technical contractors to do things like configure salesforce or help choose a set of services that integrate nicely. But these needn't be developers in the classic sense. Short contracts, and trading on BA/negotiation rather than true technical skill. I imagine it is possible to build a startup like TaskRabbit without writing a line of code now, and you could run that company without needing to own or rent a single server (or even a laptop with BYOD?).

by j_s 10y ago

T-A 10y ago

I don't know about "emerging", but at this point it's impossible not to mention AR/VR and machine learning. Developer Economics highlighted both in their latest report [1] - and that is also a partial answer to your second question, their free quarterly surveys are a good way to keep an eye on tech trends. As an aside, I remain puzzled by HN's hit-and-miss deduplication. Sometimes I submit something and it's caught immediately. Then [2] happens. [1] https://www.developereconomics.com/reports/developer-economics-state-developer-nation-q3-2016 https://www.developereconomics.com/reports/developer-economi... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317342 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12317342

BatFastard 10y ago
Not sure about VR, but AR/MR will be huge.
- cheez 10y ago
  VR will be a niche entertainment conduit not entirely unlike speciality televisions to start, but then the technology will normalize and filter to every home. In 5-10 years, expect VR to be as pervasive as consoles, if not sooner. Though in keeping with the spirit of the post, that's not 2016.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

My few impressions: - WebAssembly and utter dominance of browsers and JavaScript as a development platform. I don't particularly like the latter very much, but it's hard for me to deny it is happening. People are writing desktop apps using Electron, mobile apps are being made as embedded browsers or replaced entirely by websites, and some folks are even making JavaScript (and node.js) work on microcontrollers. - More and more languages seem to be getting REPLs, so maybe - in a few more decades - we'll see something resembling the good development environments of the Lisp Machines time. - Who knows, maybe we will finally decentralize the cloud again? I don't fully understand the things like AWS Lambda, "compute services" and other related buzzwords, but I know the model I'd like to see - where the cloud provides only computing power, and code can be run on data as decided by users instead of users having to give away their data to the owners of the code. I'm not sure if this is how things turn out, but I feel like some components of that better future are being built now. - We'll see an emergence of another job - of people who are something between a developer and a devops, people who "orchestrate" all that god-awful tooling mess of build systems, packaging systems, containers, balancers, fleets, forward-reverse-backward distributed scheduling proxies and whatnot. It's getting out of hand very fast. EDIT: Cloud-to-Butt extension strikes again; I keep forgetting about it when editing posts...

zxv 10y ago
I'm not a fan, but there are interesting things happening Javascript even in systems programming. For example, consider Joyent's open-source NFS server in javascript. https://github.com/joyent/sdc-nfs https://github.com/joyent/sdc-nfs
- jjnoakes 10y ago
  System programming in JavaScript makes me feel queasy.
  - jclulow 10y ago
    Why is that? It's not perfect, but we have a number of vital systems programming facilities available. For instance, we can (through mdb, the debugger, and the mdb_v8 module) inspect all of the Javascript (and native) state in a core file -- all of the Javascript objects, the current stack trace with arguments for each frame, etc. That core file can be taken at our discretion via gcore(1) without terminating the process, or in response to an abort(3C) or unhandled Javascript exception. We also have excellent support for dynamic instrumentation, via DTrace and USDT. DTrace has essentially zero overhead for disabled probes and doesn't require rebuilding, reconfiguring, or even restarting the process in question to start collecting data. We've added DTrace probes to "bunyan", our logging framework, so that we can get TRACE level logs as probe firings without needing them to be enabled all the time. We've also added probes to "restify", the HTTP server upon which we build most of our REST services, so that we can track the invocation of particular routes and handlers. Both of these facilities are vital for chasing down and fixing bugs in production systems, without which many issues would be much harder -- or even impossible! -- to solve. This is especially for the not insignificant class of bugs that _only_ show up in production and are _not_ reproducible. Or the class of bugs that we have hit at most once in a week, a month, a year, or (practically) ever. I'm always on the look out for new languages and platforms that provide these features, but in the mean time we do some pretty solid systems programming work with Javascript.
    - jjnoakes 10y ago

pascalxus 10y ago

Well the whole blockchain thing is part of a slightly broader potential trend: decentralization. We're starting to see social networks that are decentralized: like Dystopia and another more recent one i can't remember the name of. But, I don't think they're catching on - there's not much interest from users. These things basically use client desktops as mini-servers to serve up pages that used to come from a centralized location. In theory, technically speaking, many things could be run this way. The million dollar question is: why should we do this? Where's the value? Are users so paranoid about centralized tech companies owning their content, that they'd be willing to do all this?

natrius 10y ago
Decentralized social software allows permissionless innovation on top. Anyone can add new features and release them to users. These networks are less capable and less user friendly today, but they won't stay that way, especially if we find a good way to fund development work on them. Users will choose decentralized software not because of ideology or paranoia. They will choose it because it will be better, just like they chose the open internet over AOL.
- pascalxus 10y ago
  That's good point about "permissionless innovation". It will be interesting to see where this has the most value and what problems it solves, that can't already be solved by the current incumbents.

clumsysmurf 10y ago

Reversing the flow of information to a few companies that gives them unprecedented power over the people. More specifically, decentralizing the web with things like: * Tim Berners-Lee Solid (store your data in “pods” (personal online data stores) that are hosted wherever you would like but only allow applications you have given permission to access) * IPFS * blockchain These ideas are here http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-web/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/ways-to-decentralize-the-we...

shubb 10y ago

Maybe the end of professionalized IT outside of tech companies. I think we are moving towards even non technical teams selecting and administrating their own devices, and getting business done with a selection of SAS offerings. There will still be a need for technical contractors to do things like configure salesforce or help choose a set of services that integrate nicely. But these needn't be developers in the classic sense. Short contracts, and trading on BA/negotiation rather than true technical skill. I imagine it is possible to build a startup like TaskRabbit without writing a line of code now, and you could run that company without needing to own or rent a single server (or even a laptop with BYOD?).