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What's the last truly new thing you can think of? I'm interested because I am young (22) but have studied programming language paradigms and history and I also

What's the last truly new thing you can think of? I'm interested because I am young (22) but have studied programming language paradigms and history and I also agree a lot of "new" stuff is old.

TheCowboy 10y ago
Not exactly "new" but: Being able to spend ~$30 on a system powerful enough do everything faster than you could years ago for thousands of yesterday dollars. The feeling of not being limited by computing power for every thing is incredible. Vice versa, feeling like you aren't imaginative enough to utilize modern day power available, it's a great time to push your mind harder to take advantage of it.
danpat 10y ago
I work on navigation software (http://project-osrm.org/ http://project-osrm.org/). Many of the algorithms we're implementing (or at least considering) only exist in recently published papers, or sit behind unpublished APIs. There have been huge improvements in graph route-finding algorithms in the last decade, so much of it is new, interesting and it's far from run-of-the-mill implementation. I'm 38 - I spent the first many years of my career doing CRUD development, first in Perl (late 90's), then Java/PHP (2000's). I skipped the JS craze, and now I'm enjoying my work more than ever improving my C++ skills (last time I touched C++ was 98, modern C++14 is a huge improvement) and working on backend, specialized algorithm implementation. It's great! Experience is the best teacher. Kids don't listen to their parents, new developers don't listen to the greybeards until it's too late. This is the way things are :-)
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
  >> backend, specialized algorithm implementation Sounds great - how does one go about finding that sort of work in the industry?
  - danpat 10y ago
    I went looking. After years of cruft work, I took some time off to pursue other interests. When I was ready to come back to software development, I took a good hard look at the things I actually enjoyed doing, then went looking for organizations that did that stuff. I was fortunate to have the breathing room to be deliberate in my search.
- rak00n 10y ago
  I dropped a few pins and I'm genuinely impressed how fast it is.
asimuvPR 10y ago
Anything to do with computer vision controlled navigation is a good source of new challenges and new discoveries / inventions.
catscratch 10y ago
A history of new things geared toward web app developers, starting with relevant popular technologies: Late 1970s: microcomputers, explosion of BASIC and ASM development Early 1980s: proliferation of modems, BBS's become big, Compuserve becomes big- people able to read news online and chat in real-time (but not popular like much later). software stores, software pirating, computer clubs, widespread use of Apple II's in schools. Microsoft Flight Simulator released in 1982 is first super-popular 3D simulation software. Mid-1980s: GUIs- Macintosh 1984 based on ideas from Xerox PARC. Late 1980s: Graphics had more colors, more resolution, faster processors. So- cooler games. File servers. 1987 GIF format, 1989 GIF format supporting animation, transparency, metadata- not that popularly used though- was a compuserve thing. Early 1990s: Internet, realistic quality pictures, webpages/browsing, global file servers. Mosaic web browser. Most pages involved horizontal rule dividers that might be rainbow animated GIFs. Bulleted lists. Under construction GIFs were popular. Linux. JPEG format. Netscape. Blink tags. Mid 1990s: Windows 95 (with Winsock). IE vs Netscape. IE had marquees. VBScript. (Mocha->LiveScript->)JavaScript. Applets. Shockwave. WebCrawler search. Altavista search. OOP pretty solidly how you should program now with C++ having been around for a while and Java slow but write once/run anywhere and OOP. Apache webserver. CGI: can email from webpage. Late 1990s: ActionScript. Google search. CSS. Extreme programming. Scrum. JSP. Some using ORM via Toplink. Java session vs. entity beans. IIS. Java multithreading. Amazon gets patent for 1-click ordering. AOL instant messenger. PhP. Early 2000s: ASP. .Net/C#. Hibernate ORM (free). Choosing between different Java container servers. Mid 2000s: Use CSS not tables. Rails. Late 2000s: SPA and automatic updating of content in background via Ajax. Mobile apps. Mobile web. Scala. Cloud computing start. VMs. Streaming video mature. Configuration management via Chef/Puppet. Early 2010s: Cloud computing standard. Container virtualization. Video conferencing is normal- not just big company office thing. Orchestration of VMs more normal. Mid 2010s: Container Quantum computing starts at a basic level (not important yet). Note how I can't really thing of anything recently that has to do with new things in webdev.
- EGreg 10y ago
  Trends: Ajax, Long polling, WebSockets jQuery/MooTools/Prototype, Bootstrap/CanMVC, Angular/React Javascript debugging tools, profiling, 60fps, responsive pages, AMP RSS, Web Push, WebRTC HTTP Auth, Cookies, oAuth, new social protocols Perl, Java, PHP, Node.js, Go
Animats 10y ago
New stuff: Machine learning that works. Rust's borrow checker. 3D SLAM that works. Voice input that works. Lots of image processing stuff. Machines with large numbers of non-shared-memory CPUs that are actually useful. Doing non-graphics things in GPUs. The webcrap world is mostly churn, not improvement. Each "framework" puts developers on a treadmill keeping up with the changes. This provides steady employment for many people, but hasn't improved web sites much. An incredible amount of effort seems to go into packaging, build, and container systems, yet most of them suck. They're complex because they contain so many parts, but what they do isn't that interesting. Stuff we should have had by now but don't: a secure microkernel OS in wide use. Program verification that's usable by non-PhDs. An end to buffer overflows.
- jhall1468 10y ago
  Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.
  - barrkel 10y ago
    In 2005, I worked on a crud app framework that used data binding driven from the server and doing minimal partial updates of the web page in a way that is much more efficient both in resources and development time than anything currently mainstream. That was the second version of something that used XML islands to do data fetching before XHR was introduced by Microsoft. IMO most mainstream JS dev is just barely catching up with what smart devs were doing in individual shops.
  - lucozade 10y ago
    Another way to look at it is that, even after 20 years and huge investment from serious companies, we can still only build poor substitutes for desktop applications. Don't get me wrong, it is amazing progress given the technology you have to fight. But in absolute terms it's not that great.

What's the last truly new thing you can think of? I'm interested because I am young (22) but have studied programming language paradigms and history and I also agree a lot of "new" stuff is old.

TheCowboy 10y ago

Not exactly "new" but: Being able to spend ~$30 on a system powerful enough do everything faster than you could years ago for thousands of yesterday dollars. The feeling of not being limited by computing power for every thing is incredible. Vice versa, feeling like you aren't imaginative enough to utilize modern day power available, it's a great time to push your mind harder to take advantage of it.

danpat 10y ago

I work on navigation software (http://project-osrm.org/ http://project-osrm.org/). Many of the algorithms we're implementing (or at least considering) only exist in recently published papers, or sit behind unpublished APIs. There have been huge improvements in graph route-finding algorithms in the last decade, so much of it is new, interesting and it's far from run-of-the-mill implementation. I'm 38 - I spent the first many years of my career doing CRUD development, first in Perl (late 90's), then Java/PHP (2000's). I skipped the JS craze, and now I'm enjoying my work more than ever improving my C++ skills (last time I touched C++ was 98, modern C++14 is a huge improvement) and working on backend, specialized algorithm implementation. It's great! Experience is the best teacher. Kids don't listen to their parents, new developers don't listen to the greybeards until it's too late. This is the way things are :-)

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> backend, specialized algorithm implementation Sounds great - how does one go about finding that sort of work in the industry?
- danpat 10y ago
  I went looking. After years of cruft work, I took some time off to pursue other interests. When I was ready to come back to software development, I took a good hard look at the things I actually enjoyed doing, then went looking for organizations that did that stuff. I was fortunate to have the breathing room to be deliberate in my search.
rak00n 10y ago
I dropped a few pins and I'm genuinely impressed how fast it is.

asimuvPR 10y ago

Anything to do with computer vision controlled navigation is a good source of new challenges and new discoveries / inventions.

catscratch 10y ago

A history of new things geared toward web app developers, starting with relevant popular technologies: Late 1970s: microcomputers, explosion of BASIC and ASM development Early 1980s: proliferation of modems, BBS's become big, Compuserve becomes big- people able to read news online and chat in real-time (but not popular like much later). software stores, software pirating, computer clubs, widespread use of Apple II's in schools. Microsoft Flight Simulator released in 1982 is first super-popular 3D simulation software. Mid-1980s: GUIs- Macintosh 1984 based on ideas from Xerox PARC. Late 1980s: Graphics had more colors, more resolution, faster processors. So- cooler games. File servers. 1987 GIF format, 1989 GIF format supporting animation, transparency, metadata- not that popularly used though- was a compuserve thing. Early 1990s: Internet, realistic quality pictures, webpages/browsing, global file servers. Mosaic web browser. Most pages involved horizontal rule dividers that might be rainbow animated GIFs. Bulleted lists. Under construction GIFs were popular. Linux. JPEG format. Netscape. Blink tags. Mid 1990s: Windows 95 (with Winsock). IE vs Netscape. IE had marquees. VBScript. (Mocha->LiveScript->)JavaScript. Applets. Shockwave. WebCrawler search. Altavista search. OOP pretty solidly how you should program now with C++ having been around for a while and Java slow but write once/run anywhere and OOP. Apache webserver. CGI: can email from webpage. Late 1990s: ActionScript. Google search. CSS. Extreme programming. Scrum. JSP. Some using ORM via Toplink. Java session vs. entity beans. IIS. Java multithreading. Amazon gets patent for 1-click ordering. AOL instant messenger. PhP. Early 2000s: ASP. .Net/C#. Hibernate ORM (free). Choosing between different Java container servers. Mid 2000s: Use CSS not tables. Rails. Late 2000s: SPA and automatic updating of content in background via Ajax. Mobile apps. Mobile web. Scala. Cloud computing start. VMs. Streaming video mature. Configuration management via Chef/Puppet. Early 2010s: Cloud computing standard. Container virtualization. Video conferencing is normal- not just big company office thing. Orchestration of VMs more normal. Mid 2010s: Container Quantum computing starts at a basic level (not important yet). Note how I can't really thing of anything recently that has to do with new things in webdev.

EGreg 10y ago
Trends: Ajax, Long polling, WebSockets jQuery/MooTools/Prototype, Bootstrap/CanMVC, Angular/React Javascript debugging tools, profiling, 60fps, responsive pages, AMP RSS, Web Push, WebRTC HTTP Auth, Cookies, oAuth, new social protocols Perl, Java, PHP, Node.js, Go

Animats 10y ago

New stuff: Machine learning that works. Rust's borrow checker. 3D SLAM that works. Voice input that works. Lots of image processing stuff. Machines with large numbers of non-shared-memory CPUs that are actually useful. Doing non-graphics things in GPUs. The webcrap world is mostly churn, not improvement. Each "framework" puts developers on a treadmill keeping up with the changes. This provides steady employment for many people, but hasn't improved web sites much. An incredible amount of effort seems to go into packaging, build, and container systems, yet most of them suck. They're complex because they contain so many parts, but what they do isn't that interesting. Stuff we should have had by now but don't: a secure microkernel OS in wide use. Program verification that's usable by non-PhDs. An end to buffer overflows.

jhall1468 10y ago
Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.
- barrkel 10y ago
  In 2005, I worked on a crud app framework that used data binding driven from the server and doing minimal partial updates of the web page in a way that is much more efficient both in resources and development time than anything currently mainstream. That was the second version of something that used XML islands to do data fetching before XHR was introduced by Microsoft. IMO most mainstream JS dev is just barely catching up with what smart devs were doing in individual shops.
- lucozade 10y ago
  Another way to look at it is that, even after 20 years and huge investment from serious companies, we can still only build poor substitutes for desktop applications. Don't get me wrong, it is amazing progress given the technology you have to fight. But in absolute terms it's not that great.