8 ms·

Was Steve Yegge Right?

75 points by nhashem 15y ago

pchristensen 15y ago
#7: The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. This was written in 2004. iPhone App Store launched July 2008. Pretty good prediction. Overall interesting to read these and see how many of them he nailed.
jleader 15y ago
I think he's actually somewhat correct about multi-threaded programming, at least in some areas. Multi-threading works (aside from all the problems Yegge mentions) when you're dealing with multiple cores in a single box, but it doesn't scale at all well across a distributed system. As a counter-example, Map-Reduce has exploded since Yegge's post, as a way to get practical parallel speedups for certain kinds of tasks, without even having to think about race conditions, deadlocks, etc. Now Map-Reduce isn't useful for all the same problems as multi-threading, so one isn't going to replace the other, but it's just an example of an area where the multi-threading paradigm fails.
- njharman 15y ago
  Totally agree. "out of favor" != "gone". Distributed, message/actor models have exploded. There are better options to multithreading now. Only niches (often front end ui something) need multithreading.
  - nickik 15y ago
    Depending on what you meen by multithreading. Is multithreading when you use threads (and locks) directly or if your using multible threads in your programm in some way. Acctully using threads probebly went back because of Actor Framworks, better understanding off developers, STM ....
- pnathan 15y ago
  Multithreading is certainly popular to pee on these days. It requires a fairly high level of understanding of how your data flows to get right, and languages do not help you out in that mechanism. So CSP-based models have gained a lot of popularity, as a way to kludge around it and get most of the benefit (but shared memory is still a property of threading I don't see emergent in the CSP approaches currently).
  - jerf 15y ago
    To the extent that multithreading is popular to pee on, it's precisely because of the shared memory, or more accurately, the shared mutable variables. There's a lot of interesting concurrency solutions being developed, but it looks to me that shared mutable variables aren't going to be in any of them, so don't hold your breath waiting for them to come back. (The video at [1] is interesting overview of all the various Haskell solutions, which is interesting beyond just Haskell as an overview of a variety of concurrency approaches.) [1]: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/talk-by-haskell-expert-simon-peyton-jones/js-1434 http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/talk-by-haskell-expert...
    - gcp 15y ago
      Shared memory can give strong performance advantages that the alternatives don't have. You pay for this in implementation complexity. Each can decide how much he or she wants to pay. The price could be lowered by some trivially better support functions. Why for example C++0x doesn't have lockless concurrent containers in the standard library is beyond me.
- i5ao 15y ago
  agreed. see also redis, node.js et al. evented is the new threaded.
presidentender 15y ago
Steve Yegge is always right; unfortunately, sometimes he's right too early. This was the case with his game, Wyvern, which was a something akin to a beautifully retro meeting of Nethack and Everquest... with a client for the Sharp Zaurus. If it'd been iPhone, it would have taken off. It was just way too early.
- jeffdavis 15y ago
  "Steve Yegge is always right; unfortunately, sometimes he's right too early." What year do you think XML databases will take over?
  - Macha 15y ago
    I believe the point he's making (which I don't nessecarily agree with) is that he's right about the changes in direction, but he tries to estimate the result in the context of what currently exists. So for example, he got it right that mobile games would be big, but they were big on iOS which didn't exist at the time he tried to make use of it. Nd he was right that relational databases would decline. At at the time not relational meant XML. He couldn't predict the NoSQL of today, because that just didn't exist. Personally, I think that argument is just retroactively applying meanings that weren't there, however.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
brianleb 15y ago
Prediction #9: Apple’s laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. Reason for prediction: Macs rule. Windows laptops are as exciting as a shiny disco ball in the ceiling. Honestly, to me, that's just absurd on a fundamental level. And the reasoning just reeks of fanboy-ism (note: I have no idea who Steve Yegge is - I just clicked through out of curiosity). I tried to actually Google the market share for Macbooks, but it’s probably impossible to find an absolute number. Not hard. Found the following with two searches in just a few minutes: Circa Q2'08 (so, four years after the prediction) [1]: Apple laptop North American market share 10.6%. Dell and HP are both 21%, Acer is just under 15%, Toshiba is 9%, and "All Others" are 22%. Circa Q1'11 Apple Notebooks are 5.7% global market share [2] and Apple is 8.5% of shipped notebooks + desktops [3]. At best, Apple COO Tim Cook says in Oct. 2010 that 20% of sold laptops + desktops are Macs [4]. [1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/09/apple-gains-us-market-share-in-laptops.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/09/apple-gains-us-mar... [2] http://www.ventureoutsource.com/contract-manufacturing/taiwanese-odms-toothache-apple http://www.ventureoutsource.com/contract-manufacturing/taiwa... [3] http://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-loses-its-Q1-2011-market-share-position-to-Apple-in-the-U-S.51580.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-loses-its-Q1-2011-market-s... [4] http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/App-Store-comes-to-Mac-in-90-days-new-iLife-Suite-and-trimmer-MacBook-Air-available-now/1287600183 http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/App-Store-comes-to...
- dangoor 15y ago
  It's hard to say what Steve meant by "laptop sales". I'm assuming that your interpretation (unit sales) is probably correct and Apple is definitely not that large. Their growth is certainly outpacing the industry, so maybe Steve is off in timing, but Apple doesn't keep on the low end which makes it harder to build up unit volume. Even by revenue metrics, I doubt that Apple is bigger than all of those brands combined. The thing is that Apple seems to maximize on profit (silly folks, they should know that market share is what you're going for). I couldn't find the figures, but I'd be curious to see what percentage of laptop profits belong to Apple. In the case of mobile phones, Apple now gets 60% of the profit in the industry.
- bhousel 15y ago
libria 15y ago
Prediction #8: Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. Pretty close; there have been recent signs of this. Appengine is switching to a stricter payment plan. Google Apps for domain reduced their free user limit to 10. A lot of free API's are shutting down and some new ones require billing (Prediction, Storage, Search). Although, in his particular case, it's Google paying him for his services...
- gcp 15y ago
  Some things like the online photo albums have pretty low limits (1G storage). If I end up paying it will probably be for that. Despite having my own web-server, the link-in to my Android phone is huge convenience factor.
Rexxar 15y ago
Concerning "Prediction #4": I have the impression that the author of the article look at the global Java market share whereas Steve Yegge speaks of the market share of java on the jvm.
- Confusion 15y ago
  The global Java market share has never been above 50%. Moreover, the author combines achieving 4 and 5.
wingo 15y ago
I enjoyed the article; a bit fluffy, but fun. However, oversee.net? The thing that comes to mind directly is "overseer", in the southern slaveocracy sense. (I say this as one who grew up in the southern US.) What an unfortunate name!
- dpark 15y ago
  Really, you get "southern slaveocracy" from "oversee"? Oversee just means to watch over, to monitor. Edit: Seriously, do a search on the term "oversee". It's a common term and it's related to slavery the same way "driver" is, which is to say basically not at all. http://www.google.com/search?q=oversee http://www.google.com/search?q=oversee
  - wingo 15y ago
    Really, I do. "Oversee" can be used in a sentence as a verb without the connotation. But when I see "oversee.net" -- the noun -- I think "overseer", and "overseer" is not a word that I can hear without thinking "slavery".
    - dpark 15y ago
      I don't get the slavery connection from "overseer", either. That's still a common term, and not closely tied to slavery. It just means someone who oversees, a manager/supervisor/foreman. Dictionaries (the ones I checked at least) don't even mention slavery, though I did notice a lot of slavery-related "related searches" on dictionary.com. Obviously what you see is what you see, so you're not wrong, but I think the connection isn't something most people would see.
jeffdavis 15y ago
"Prediction #1: XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011." WRONG. Aren't we capable of calling "false" statements "false" anymore? I can't believe that the author defended this prediction. I'm sure you can twist the words "popular", "database", and "XML" around enough to try to make some argument that he was almost right. But if you read the full original prediction it's even more clear that he was as wrong as it is possible to be in a prediction.
- code_duck 15y ago
  It seems instead of XML databases, we're seeing JSON databases. True that they're far from surpassing or even nearing relational databases in popularity. Rleatoipnal databases are rather fundamental software, and there is such a vast amount of code and habits related to their use, that the prediction that they will be 'surpassed' buy something else only 6-7 years out is rather brash.
  - jeffdavis 15y ago
    "It seems instead of XML databases, we're seeing JSON databases." Even that one grain of truth doesn't hold up if you read his original prediction. He was talking about pretty XML-specific stuff like XPath and XQuery, and even things like DTDs and Schemas; so schema-less document stores just don't fit Yegge's story. I don't have anything against Yegge for making such a prediction, and I'm sure he's not all that concerned that he was wrong. However, I don't think the author is being intellectually honest when he tries to twist it into a "partially right", and I do have something against that.
- reinhardt 15y ago
  Spot on. At least half of these predictions are from marginally passable to blatantly wrong, with #1 and #5 taking the cake. Clojure's "emergence" as the language du jour in HN's echo chamber doesn't put Lisp "in the top 10 most popular programming languages", not even close.
delinka 15y ago
"Prediction #10: In five years’ time, most programmers will still be average." Just remember, half the population is below average intelligence.
- joeburke 15y ago
  You only have a 50% chance of this being correct. Replace "average" with "median" and you're at 100%.
  - gcp 15y ago
    Isn't it normally distributed? In which case using average is fine.

75 points by nhashem 15y ago

#7: The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. This was written in 2004. iPhone App Store launched July 2008. Pretty good prediction. Overall interesting to read these and see how many of them he nailed.

jleader 15y ago

I think he's actually somewhat correct about multi-threaded programming, at least in some areas. Multi-threading works (aside from all the problems Yegge mentions) when you're dealing with multiple cores in a single box, but it doesn't scale at all well across a distributed system. As a counter-example, Map-Reduce has exploded since Yegge's post, as a way to get practical parallel speedups for certain kinds of tasks, without even having to think about race conditions, deadlocks, etc. Now Map-Reduce isn't useful for all the same problems as multi-threading, so one isn't going to replace the other, but it's just an example of an area where the multi-threading paradigm fails.

njharman 15y ago
Totally agree. "out of favor" != "gone". Distributed, message/actor models have exploded. There are better options to multithreading now. Only niches (often front end ui something) need multithreading.
- nickik 15y ago
  Depending on what you meen by multithreading. Is multithreading when you use threads (and locks) directly or if your using multible threads in your programm in some way. Acctully using threads probebly went back because of Actor Framworks, better understanding off developers, STM ....
pnathan 15y ago
Multithreading is certainly popular to pee on these days. It requires a fairly high level of understanding of how your data flows to get right, and languages do not help you out in that mechanism. So CSP-based models have gained a lot of popularity, as a way to kludge around it and get most of the benefit (but shared memory is still a property of threading I don't see emergent in the CSP approaches currently).
- jerf 15y ago
  To the extent that multithreading is popular to pee on, it's precisely because of the shared memory, or more accurately, the shared mutable variables. There's a lot of interesting concurrency solutions being developed, but it looks to me that shared mutable variables aren't going to be in any of them, so don't hold your breath waiting for them to come back. (The video at [1] is interesting overview of all the various Haskell solutions, which is interesting beyond just Haskell as an overview of a variety of concurrency approaches.) [1]: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/talk-by-haskell-expert-simon-peyton-jones/js-1434 http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/talk-by-haskell-expert...
  - gcp 15y ago
    Shared memory can give strong performance advantages that the alternatives don't have. You pay for this in implementation complexity. Each can decide how much he or she wants to pay. The price could be lowered by some trivially better support functions. Why for example C++0x doesn't have lockless concurrent containers in the standard library is beyond me.
i5ao 15y ago
agreed. see also redis, node.js et al. evented is the new threaded.

presidentender 15y ago

Steve Yegge is always right; unfortunately, sometimes he's right too early. This was the case with his game, Wyvern, which was a something akin to a beautifully retro meeting of Nethack and Everquest... with a client for the Sharp Zaurus. If it'd been iPhone, it would have taken off. It was just way too early.

jeffdavis 15y ago
"Steve Yegge is always right; unfortunately, sometimes he's right too early." What year do you think XML databases will take over?
- Macha 15y ago
  I believe the point he's making (which I don't nessecarily agree with) is that he's right about the changes in direction, but he tries to estimate the result in the context of what currently exists. So for example, he got it right that mobile games would be big, but they were big on iOS which didn't exist at the time he tried to make use of it. Nd he was right that relational databases would decline. At at the time not relational meant XML. He couldn't predict the NoSQL of today, because that just didn't exist. Personally, I think that argument is just retroactively applying meanings that weren't there, however.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

brianleb 15y ago

Prediction #9: Apple’s laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. Reason for prediction: Macs rule. Windows laptops are as exciting as a shiny disco ball in the ceiling. Honestly, to me, that's just absurd on a fundamental level. And the reasoning just reeks of fanboy-ism (note: I have no idea who Steve Yegge is - I just clicked through out of curiosity). I tried to actually Google the market share for Macbooks, but it’s probably impossible to find an absolute number. Not hard. Found the following with two searches in just a few minutes: Circa Q2'08 (so, four years after the prediction) [1]: Apple laptop North American market share 10.6%. Dell and HP are both 21%, Acer is just under 15%, Toshiba is 9%, and "All Others" are 22%. Circa Q1'11 Apple Notebooks are 5.7% global market share [2] and Apple is 8.5% of shipped notebooks + desktops [3]. At best, Apple COO Tim Cook says in Oct. 2010 that 20% of sold laptops + desktops are Macs [4]. [1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/09/apple-gains-us-market-share-in-laptops.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/09/apple-gains-us-mar... [2] http://www.ventureoutsource.com/contract-manufacturing/taiwanese-odms-toothache-apple http://www.ventureoutsource.com/contract-manufacturing/taiwa... [3] http://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-loses-its-Q1-2011-market-share-position-to-Apple-in-the-U-S.51580.0.html http://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-loses-its-Q1-2011-market-s... [4] http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/App-Store-comes-to-Mac-in-90-days-new-iLife-Suite-and-trimmer-MacBook-Air-available-now/1287600183 http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/App-Store-comes-to...

dangoor 15y ago
It's hard to say what Steve meant by "laptop sales". I'm assuming that your interpretation (unit sales) is probably correct and Apple is definitely not that large. Their growth is certainly outpacing the industry, so maybe Steve is off in timing, but Apple doesn't keep on the low end which makes it harder to build up unit volume. Even by revenue metrics, I doubt that Apple is bigger than all of those brands combined. The thing is that Apple seems to maximize on profit (silly folks, they should know that market share is what you're going for). I couldn't find the figures, but I'd be curious to see what percentage of laptop profits belong to Apple. In the case of mobile phones, Apple now gets 60% of the profit in the industry.
bhousel 15y ago

libria 15y ago

Prediction #8: Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. Pretty close; there have been recent signs of this. Appengine is switching to a stricter payment plan. Google Apps for domain reduced their free user limit to 10. A lot of free API's are shutting down and some new ones require billing (Prediction, Storage, Search). Although, in his particular case, it's Google paying him for his services...

gcp 15y ago
Some things like the online photo albums have pretty low limits (1G storage). If I end up paying it will probably be for that. Despite having my own web-server, the link-in to my Android phone is huge convenience factor.

Rexxar 15y ago

Concerning "Prediction #4": I have the impression that the author of the article look at the global Java market share whereas Steve Yegge speaks of the market share of java on the jvm.

Confusion 15y ago
The global Java market share has never been above 50%. Moreover, the author combines achieving 4 and 5.

wingo 15y ago

I enjoyed the article; a bit fluffy, but fun. However, oversee.net? The thing that comes to mind directly is "overseer", in the southern slaveocracy sense. (I say this as one who grew up in the southern US.) What an unfortunate name!

dpark 15y ago
Really, you get "southern slaveocracy" from "oversee"? Oversee just means to watch over, to monitor. Edit: Seriously, do a search on the term "oversee". It's a common term and it's related to slavery the same way "driver" is, which is to say basically not at all. http://www.google.com/search?q=oversee http://www.google.com/search?q=oversee
- wingo 15y ago
  Really, I do. "Oversee" can be used in a sentence as a verb without the connotation. But when I see "oversee.net" -- the noun -- I think "overseer", and "overseer" is not a word that I can hear without thinking "slavery".
  - dpark 15y ago
    I don't get the slavery connection from "overseer", either. That's still a common term, and not closely tied to slavery. It just means someone who oversees, a manager/supervisor/foreman. Dictionaries (the ones I checked at least) don't even mention slavery, though I did notice a lot of slavery-related "related searches" on dictionary.com. Obviously what you see is what you see, so you're not wrong, but I think the connection isn't something most people would see.

jeffdavis 15y ago

"Prediction #1: XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011." WRONG. Aren't we capable of calling "false" statements "false" anymore? I can't believe that the author defended this prediction. I'm sure you can twist the words "popular", "database", and "XML" around enough to try to make some argument that he was almost right. But if you read the full original prediction it's even more clear that he was as wrong as it is possible to be in a prediction.

code_duck 15y ago
It seems instead of XML databases, we're seeing JSON databases. True that they're far from surpassing or even nearing relational databases in popularity. Rleatoipnal databases are rather fundamental software, and there is such a vast amount of code and habits related to their use, that the prediction that they will be 'surpassed' buy something else only 6-7 years out is rather brash.
- jeffdavis 15y ago
  "It seems instead of XML databases, we're seeing JSON databases." Even that one grain of truth doesn't hold up if you read his original prediction. He was talking about pretty XML-specific stuff like XPath and XQuery, and even things like DTDs and Schemas; so schema-less document stores just don't fit Yegge's story. I don't have anything against Yegge for making such a prediction, and I'm sure he's not all that concerned that he was wrong. However, I don't think the author is being intellectually honest when he tries to twist it into a "partially right", and I do have something against that.
reinhardt 15y ago
Spot on. At least half of these predictions are from marginally passable to blatantly wrong, with #1 and #5 taking the cake. Clojure's "emergence" as the language du jour in HN's echo chamber doesn't put Lisp "in the top 10 most popular programming languages", not even close.

delinka 15y ago

"Prediction #10: In five years’ time, most programmers will still be average." Just remember, half the population is below average intelligence.

joeburke 15y ago
You only have a 50% chance of this being correct. Replace "average" with "median" and you're at 100%.
- gcp 15y ago
  Isn't it normally distributed? In which case using average is fine.