4 ms·

Going back to the late 90s, I think these are the only interesting bets taken by the industry: - Ericsson's Erlang/OTP - Sun's "The Network is the Computer" a

Going back to the late 90s, I think these are the only interesting bets taken by the industry: - Ericsson's Erlang/OTP - Sun's "The Network is the Computer" and "Utility Computing", IoT - "Jini" (Internet-connected toasters;), and non-PC devices - smartphones, set-top boxes, smart cards - JavaCard is still popular. - Bell Labs/Lucent's Plan 9 and Inferno OS (neither is gained adoption) - Semantic Web (which never took off). IMO, XML and Enterprise Java were regression, but so is REST, JSON and dynamic scripting languages. The most recent example is GoLang. EDIT: the XML itself is a good family of specs (especially XSD, XPath and XSLT), the problem was with abusing XML by forcing it onto everything: from configuration to logs to over-the-wire format like in XMPP. I remember IBM even sold XML Accelerator appliances ;)

pjmlp 5y ago
Altought one could say that "The Network is the Computer" kind of won out, in the jungle of RPC protocols that we use nowadays. Part of Inferno OS lives on what Go took from Limbo, and Go still isn't capable of using dynamic libraries like Limbo did.
- nivertech 5y ago
  If I'm not mistaken the only part of Limbo that survived in Go is named typed channels. In Limbo/Inferno one could either download the module and run the code locally or execute the code remotely without downloading it.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Yes, and some would argue that named typed channels is one of the Go key features. The migration into variable_name type_def also had already taken place, although the Limbo does require : as separator.
cies 5y ago
> IMO, XML and Enterprise Java were regression From what? (especially XML as im not even sure what E-Java means) I think (as you also mention yourself) that XML is quite good at some things (it's schema based, can mix schemas, has namespaces, etc). Just (as you mention as well) it was overused at some point. Given we agree so much: what is it that XML was a regression from? JSON is a regression from XML wrt schemas/strictness; but then it was very low overhead (which was needed as is it gain momentum used in places where the client (JS browser app) and the server (serverside of said browser app) are both maintained by the same organization).
- nivertech 5y ago
  XML abuse was a regression from using ASN.1 or custom binary protocols, which were a much better fit for the hardware at the day. IMO Java was a dumbed-down C++ for Enterprises and an attempt by Sun to escape Wintel monopoly. We could've had a much better mainstream programming languages now than Java or C#. Better PLs means higher bar for software quality.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Sun was already doing that with OpenStep, hence why Java has interfaces (protocols), a dynamic model quite similar to Smalltalk (which got to profit form StrongTalk and SELF research) and J2EE started its life as an Objective-C framework. It was the lack of understanding with NeXT that made it fall apart and eventually Oak made into Java. EDIT: Here are some references, https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere

pjmlp 5y ago

Altought one could say that "The Network is the Computer" kind of won out, in the jungle of RPC protocols that we use nowadays. Part of Inferno OS lives on what Go took from Limbo, and Go still isn't capable of using dynamic libraries like Limbo did.

nivertech 5y ago
If I'm not mistaken the only part of Limbo that survived in Go is named typed channels. In Limbo/Inferno one could either download the module and run the code locally or execute the code remotely without downloading it.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Yes, and some would argue that named typed channels is one of the Go key features. The migration into variable_name type_def also had already taken place, although the Limbo does require : as separator.

cies 5y ago

> IMO, XML and Enterprise Java were regression From what? (especially XML as im not even sure what E-Java means) I think (as you also mention yourself) that XML is quite good at some things (it's schema based, can mix schemas, has namespaces, etc). Just (as you mention as well) it was overused at some point. Given we agree so much: what is it that XML was a regression from? JSON is a regression from XML wrt schemas/strictness; but then it was very low overhead (which was needed as is it gain momentum used in places where the client (JS browser app) and the server (serverside of said browser app) are both maintained by the same organization).

nivertech 5y ago
XML abuse was a regression from using ASN.1 or custom binary protocols, which were a much better fit for the hardware at the day. IMO Java was a dumbed-down C++ for Enterprises and an attempt by Sun to escape Wintel monopoly. We could've had a much better mainstream programming languages now than Java or C#. Better PLs means higher bar for software quality.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Sun was already doing that with OpenStep, hence why Java has interfaces (protocols), a dynamic model quite similar to Smalltalk (which got to profit form StrongTalk and SELF research) and J2EE started its life as an Objective-C framework. It was the lack of understanding with NeXT that made it fall apart and eventually Oak made into Java. EDIT: Here are some references, https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/java-objc.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Objects_Everywhere