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By using the word "ever," you cast this question into historical or even religious proportions. 1000 years ago, the primary frontend toolchains were singleton
by jMyles 10y ago
By using the word "ever," you cast this question into historical or even religious proportions.
1000 years ago, the primary frontend toolchains were singleton and handmade: every instance of a piece of data needed to be individually crafted.
500 years ago, the printing press had made significant changes, but frontends were still largely coupled to the available presses and their character sets (let alone niceties like layout and graphics).
100 years ago, frontends still remained tied to their physical layers (ie, it wasn't possible to scrape data and create a new frontend without recreating the entire medium) - ie, books and magazines and newspapers.
20 years ago, javascript was barely known even in programming circles, much less a lingua franca for publishing worldwide.
Today, javascript is the control structure by which the vast majority of data is accessed by human eyes and ears.
In 20 years, something that has already been invented but is today not largely known might well be responsible for most knowledge exchange. It's completely plausible that technologies like AR, crypto-blockchains, and newly legalized psychedelic drugs will be as important as HTTPS is today for transmission purposes, let alone the particularities of the application layer.
100 years from now, it's highly unlikely that the screen-and-keyboard model of data ingestion will be regarded as anything but a historically important link in data evolution, cast away in favor of more tactile, neurochemical, and cybernetic interfaces.
500 years from now, most of the world's governments, media traditions, and spoken dialects of language will have folded and made way for a completely new condition of humanity. Who knows what the frontend will look like.
In a 1000 years, our species might plausibly have no biological footprint (ie, no sensory organs to use for the purposes of distinguishing "frontend" from "backend") whatsoever, and live on as information and knowledge, present in the physical universe only in ways that we can't possible yet imagine.
So yes, the species will someday move away from javascript.
- z3t4 10y agoWhen we look back, we recognize that things took a lot of time, but when looking forward we expect everything to go fast ...
- nickthemagicman 10y agoUnless as we shed these corporeal bodies and transition into more informational forms of being.. what if the language that creates our informational selves is JavaScript? In other words... What if we BECOME Javascript?
- htkibar 10y agoI try to think and get undefined is not an object. Perfect.
- nickthemagicman 10y agoOr your thoughts are mixed with other peoples because you were defined globally.
- ud0 10y agoThis is a beautiful answer.
- sdegutis 10y ago> 100 years from now, it's highly unlikely that the screen-and-keyboard model of data ingestion will be regarded as anything but a historically important link in data evolution, cast away in favor of more tactile, neurochemical, and cybernetic interfaces. Very imaginative and sci-fi, but not likely. Just because we've advanced this fast in the past 50 years doesn't mean we'll be able to keep this rate up. There are physical limits to the things we can do, even if we keep gaining knowledge at the same speed. We'd have to break a lot of very big scientific barriers before any such technology would be both practical and affordable.
- jMyles 10y agoReally? It seems to me that the touchscreen has already supplanted the screen-and-keyboard for most people for most of their day.
- marssaxman 10y agoIf that's really true, I feel sorry for them! My experience with touchscreens has been that they are mostly sort of okay in small doses, if that's all you've got - but if I need to write anything longer than a sentence or two, or read anything that takes longer than a minute or two, I'll wait til I can use a computer instead.
- sdegutis 10y agoYep. 99% of programmers use an actual computer to type their code into, rather than typing on an iPad or other touch screen. And 95% of programming still requires manipulating text.
- JeffreyKaine 10y agoAnd 99.9% of humans are not programmers.
- mauvm 10y agoWell worded. I think we either bomb ourselves back to the times of basic survival or transition into digital entities.