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Flash Is Dead: What Technologies Might Be Next?
- jmnicolas 9y agoI expect Microsoft to drop Windows Phones in the next 2 years, unless it rebounds, it doesn't make financial sense to continue investing in the platform.
- frou_dh 9y agoIt's interesting that the OS is not really a separate thing, after the unification of Windows they did. So to a greater extent than Apple and especially Google, the software side of MS's phone project gets maintained "for free"?
- wodenokoto 9y agoI imagine keeping windows compatible with 2 so different hardware platforms is far from free.
- frou_dh 9y agoWell presumably they want compatibility with tablet style ARM devices regardless of what happens with phones.
- petecox 9y agoThe hardware on a Windows 10 ARM tablet is more or less the same (Snapdragon 835) as powers a mobile, only the screen is larger and they remove the app that makes phone calls.
- WorldMaker 9y agoThere's even rumors that the Phone Call app will even show up on ARM tablets with SIM cards at some point, for people that like the "phablet" thing. (Which is hand in hand with the rumors/indications that Skype might eat the phone call app entirely and just light up SIM-based calling if the machine is capable, regardless of form factor, possible with inter-device VOIP communication like it manages SMS pass-through, when enabled, now.)
- jlebrech 9y agoa wasm based animation framework.
- tannhaeuser 9y agoErr, the title is supposed to read "What Technologies Might Be Next [to bite the dust]?" I guess. A replacement for timed/declarative animation on the Web is, of course, still needed (if for ads alone), but it looks like browsers/HTML5/JS libs are deemed good enough so instead of multimedia runtimes/engines we're going to see authoring tools. Though audio/video sync and the state of SVG (and of SVG animation on FF in particular) leaves much to be desired IMO.
- coldtea 9y ago>is, of course, still needed (if for ads alone) I think "needed" and "ads" should not go into the same sentence...
- micael_dias 9y agoStack Overflow Documentation
- amelius 9y ago> Flash Is Dead: What Technologies Might Be Next? My vote goes to Platform-Dependent Apps.
- linopolus 9y agoI hope for platform-independent apps.
- dagenleg 9y agoFound a web developer.
- amelius 9y agoNot really. I'm building apps on Web/iOS/Android. And it sucks writing the same code for three different APIs. It's very intellectually unfulfilling work.
- swiley 9y agoWrite command line apps in C. The only platform that can't run them is iOS.
- thealistra 9y agoiOS can run Objective-C which is a superset of C, you can run the code natively and use Objective-C to display it.
- swiley 9y agoiOS lacks fork and kills your app if it doesn't yeild for some number of milliseconds. It also lacks a shell and a video terminal emulator which are kind of nice to have for these sorts of apps.
- cm2187 9y agoI have high hopes on WebAssembly. It's not the current intention but it could become a universal virtual machine.
- holydude 9y agoI think this is more or less accurate. Sad to see RoR to be declining.
- christophilus 9y agoI'm not a Ruby/Rails fan at all, but I work at a Rails shop. It would be interesting to know why the decline is happening, and what alternatives are replacing it. I suspect Elixir and Go.
- aczerepinski 9y agoPerhaps - I write mostly Go and a little Elixir at a shop that still identifies as Rails first. On the other hand, the recruiter spam I get gives me the impression that JavaScript is the main thing taking mindshare away from Rails. Both because Node is popular and because there are now a lot of front end monoliths.
- matthewmacleod 9y agoBear in mind that this is about Stack Overflow attention. It's quite possible that there's now sufficient documentation and experience in the Rails community that there's just less requirement for interaction with Stack Overflow! It also seems likely that newer developers are going to be steered towards other solutions for web development.
- beobab 9y agoIf newer developers are steered elsewhere, then you have an aging population problem, which historically leads to decline.
- holydude 9y agoWell we have discussed this in other threads already :-). That's the problem with Ruby in general that you can only solve certain problems with it. Beyond Rails,devops and some obscure embedded stuff they do in Japan there is not much that you can do with Ruby.
- newman8r 9y agoPOTS over copper wire. AT&T is legally obliged to continue offering/maintaining it (in California at least), but they don't market the service and you have to specifically ask for it. a lot of people aren't aware of the situation. AT&T is continually trying to get out of their obligation (in California at least). The fewer people who use it, the better AT&T's argument for discontinuing service becomes. In the event of a widespread disaster, people who can make a phone call are going to have better access to emergency services.
- bluedino 9y agoThey are jacking the prices up on renewal. They wanted 4x the current rate on every POTS line we had unless we bundled another service like wireless (cellular), DirecTV, or GoToMeeting
- thephyber 9y agoI remember paying ~$30/mo in 2012. Are you saying it would cost 50% more for one landline than an AT&T cell line with a healthy data plan?
- redblacktree 9y agoIs this relevant to the article? Did you post it in the wrong place?
- newman8r 9y agoyeah it's relevant as a dying technology. the article includes the iPhone on a graph, so it's not much of a leap to mention traditional telephone service.
- joezydeco 9y agoAT&T has already gotten approval in Illinois to disconnect the remaining 10% of households on POTS, pending final FCC approval. http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-att-landline-end-illinois-0706-biz-20170705-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-att-landline-end-i...
- nicktelford 9y agoIn my ideal world, PDF would be the next to die. My problem isn't with PDF itself, but that it's overused in places where it really doesn't need to be. Academic papers are the big one, where HTML would almost always be a better choice. What's even more maddening is that papers aren't written using Adobe's PDF tools, they're written in TeX and then converted. If you're an academic reading this, I implore you to please publish your papers in HTML (alongside PDF is fine too!). It makes them far easier to read, as browsers can reformat the document according to the readers needs. PDF is a type-setting format for ensuring print-accurate documents. Please stop publishing content that is meant to be consumed online in it.
- pmlnr 9y agoPDF is an OK format - if you're targetting print. TeX is better though. Unfortunately many aren't aware that CSS can help a lot with printing HTML documents, making the formatting nearly as nice as with PDF, but it takes a lot of tests to make this sure, especially with images. I wonder is there are any simple CSS templates that are view AND print friendly, possible passed to Pandoc[1], so you write your HTML and it'll just work. [1]: http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/
- blkhawk 9y agoDo you have any idea what a fuckerclust the PDF format is internally? Here is a relevant Talk from 27c3: https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4221-en-omg_wtf_pdf https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4221-en-omg_wtf_pdf
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoThat doesn't matter because it isn't bad enough to stop people writing good enough software for it.
- tannhaeuser 9y agoFor CSS Paged Media there's Prince (fka PrinceXML and expensive) and wkhtmltopdf (F/OSS, Webkit-based), but while these are certainly good enough for printing of invoices from web content and casual documents (and even academic publishing), I doubt CSS Paged Media will ever match facilities of dedicated print tool chains such as FrameMaker etc. Prince is based on a transcription of CSS to constraint logic (using the Mercury Prolog-like system), so I wonder if there's a formal specification of CSS that could be lifted into a Prolog specification to yield a CSS renderer for print (the only work I'm aware of in that direction was [1]). [1]: https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/extended.pdf https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/extend...
- tannhaeuser 9y agoWhat about CSS preprocessors and grid frameworks? SASS/less and Bootstrap are heavily used right now and I like using them, but I can see the end of the road with CSS 4 variables and CSS grid (if not with flexbox already).
- rio517 9y agoIs questions asked really a good metric? StackOverflow actively discourages asking duplicate questions, and all the easy newbie questions haven't changed in a while, it seems inevitable that certain technologies appear to decline. I feel like traffic to questions, searches or other metrics would be a better indicator. In particular, is facebook api usage really in decline? I'd be very surprised. For language/platform specific technologies, I would imagine if there were a decline the market for devs would get less tight. I'd argue that days a vacancy is open is a much better indicator than even raw number of job postings.
- oelmekki 9y agoThis is a question I usually ask too when I see those used in articles to evaluate a tech's popularity, but for the first time (afaik), it has been addressed in this article, in the section "Do question visits tell a different story?". Spoiler: they do not.
- moxious 9y agoNo metrics are perfect, this is a good one I think for trying to get at developer mindshare. Actual API usage (number of calls) I think is not useful at all. If heavy volume is concentrated in a declining number of apps using the Facebook API (just an example, I don't know) I think API usage can go up while mindshare is dropping.
- Joeri 9y agoIs questions asked really a good metric? StackOverflow actively discourages asking duplicate questions, and all the easy newbie questions haven't changed in a while, it seems inevitable that certain technologies appear to decline. This is addressed in the article. There have been 1.4 million javascript questions asked and the pace is increasing, which indicates that it's hard to exhaust a subject. I think it makes sense facebook api usage is in decline given that the game devs have moved away from it. I also don't think days a vacancy is open is a good metric, because having been on the hiring side of trying to find Delphi developers I can assure you it is very tough. Plenty of people have relevant experience, but none of them want those jobs because they think it is career suicide.
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- dep_b 9y agoIt's a pity to see asp.net decline, MVC is really nice with great IDE support. If it's due to webforms dying then it's great news. It still angers me how webforms wasted my time as a junior developer thinking it was my lack of skill that made any page beyond the trivial extremely hard to build.
- frogfuzion 9y agoAgain, with questions as a metric, this could not necessarily be viewed as a decline but more as a maturation. Wouldn't you expect less React questions in 7 years or so as well?
- eksemplar 9y agoMVC is awesome, .net core will probably be awesome as well when it gets more production ready. We use it a lot, though we also still doing a lot of webforms. Potential hires don't know or want to do razor though, and if you're doing angular/vue/react you're using web-api and then you might as well use a backend with a better time to market anyway. .NET does a lot of things right, but then you suddenly need to do a SAML SSO component for your ADFS and it's more terrible than basicaly everything.
- staticelf 9y agoBefore, I used to hate MS and .NET. Today I work as a .NET dev and love C# and .NET. Honestly, I think the moves MS is doing right now is the correct ones. With .NET Core a lot of the "heavy" stuff has been liften away and projects can easily be run on any big OS. I think we will soon see a rise in the use of ASP.NET. The productivity levels you get by using .NET and Azure is just insane.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoI love C# but I'm moving away from it because I don't want to end up in a situation where my only hosting option is Azure.
- staticelf 9y ago
- melling 9y ago“If we would have been able to see Flash’s decline in advance, what other technologies might be past their peak?” People did see it! That one was easy. You couldn’t convince Flash users. Anyway, save yourself some time and skip the debate. It really wasn’t worth it.
- mmjaa 9y agoFor me, I'm replacing any of the ol' Flash style of thinking with Lua. Specifically, MOAI: http://getmoai.com/ http://getmoai.com/ MOAI gives me everything that Flash gave me, but I have better (full) control over the stack, what goes into it, how its used, etc. And then I just compile it all to Javascript and voila! No distribution hassles (except where I want it: i.e. when delivering to iOS/Android app-stores..)
- sysdyne 9y agoJavascript
- __sr__ 9y agoI wish Java and JavaScript were next! :-)
- yoz-y 9y agoI think JavaScript could be salvaged if, let's say starting with ES8, the new version would be incompatible and old scripts would require some legacy mode. That would allow fixing the major issues.
- __sr__ 9y agoThe problem isn't so much with JavaScript as it is with the JavaScript mentality - that is not to say JavaScript doesn't have a ton of problems. No, the real problem is the mentality of cranking out new frameworks instead of actually building something useful on top of existing ones. Every year, the JS framework of choice changes to something new and you have no choice but to move on because the one you were using until recently has suddenly been dropped as the developers have moved on to the backwards incompatible next version. And then there is the mentality of writing libraries for the most trivial of tasks - left padding, seriously?
- yoz-y 9y agoJavascript would benefit from something like boost. Not in a sense of a library because that already exists with lodash and underscore and what not. But in the term of community and acceptance: "Yes, boost is bloated and not always ideal, but it is almost always a better choice than reimplementing the thing"
- n17r4m 9y agoPersonally speaking, I wish this was Meteor.js - If only there was more hoorah for this tough as nails framework.
- arvinsim 9y agoThen the proposal of the comment you are replying where he wants to start from scratch is great. How I wish Javascript has a great standard library(like Python).
- __sr__ 9y agoI wish Java and JavaScript were next! :-)
- chvid 9y agoTraditional web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, asp.net, apache wicket, jsf, Django and so on that generate HTML on the server. Over longer term: proprietary mobile app development platforms (windows phone, apple ios, android). All replaced by client side JavaScript.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoMy iPad 2 disagrees.
- egberts1 9y agoIt should be JavaScript, next: because JS is not Turing-complete.
- GuiA 9y agoUh, not sure if you're referencing a joke or something, but just to make sure no one gets confused by your post: JS absolutely is turing complete, as is trivially demonstrated by implementing a turing machine in JS.
- lord_jim 9y agoCoffeeScript. It had its time but it's focus on syntax failed to address much of what makes JavaScript difficult to work with. jquery UI. Jquery still has some use in banging out a quick page but it too is no longer essential Also possibly Bootstrap. What the hell is going on with development there?
- tannhaeuser 9y agoAbout Bootstrap: I, too, have questioned the viability of grid frameworks and CSS preprocessors here when we have CSS grids and variables, but I think Bootstrap is such a useful thing for a split designer/developer workflow that it'll live on and eventually converge into using CSS grid directly in a couple years. Bootstrap team has made slow but steady progress over the last few weekends and is working on documentation issues, so it looks like a new release is imminent. Update: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926640
- tinus_hn 9y agoFossil fuel, hopefully.
- CM30 9y agoXHTML and everything associated with it. Well okay, it's probably already considered dead, since HTML 5 has replaced in it about 95% of contexts. Turns out most people didn't want a web where a single syntax error could bring down a web page and went to the more relaxed HTML 5 the minute it was released. And while they won't die as far as their main purpose is concerned, I suspect webfonts will become a lot less popular in future. The idea of using them for icons has turned out to be a non semantic nightmare that's best done with SVG or plain old images instead. So the likes of Fontastic may not be long for this world...
- whatever_dude 9y agoYou're on to something. The xhtml fiasco has a lot of parallels to Flash, when you consider the ECMAScript history and its relation to ActionScript's evolution.