20 ms·

Ten predictions (2004)

457 points by S4M 14y ago

kushti 14y ago
# 6,9,10 are ok. Other predictions failed
icemelt8 14y ago
Wow some of them are really spot on!
- rplnt 14y ago
  And some are not. Yet?
swah 14y ago
"Important Note: the predictions themselves don't matter! Most of them are probably wrong. The point of the exercise is the exercise itself, not in what results. You should try this experiment yourself — it may show you things you're thinking that you weren't really aware of. And other people might find it interesting reading, even if there are factual errors or whatever"
xiaoma 14y ago
This really is an impressive display of foresight. It appears that all the reading Steve mentioned doing paid off. The act of discussing his predictions here on HN is foretold in prediction #6. And those that were off, were still pretty warm.
- swah 14y ago
  Whoever solves this — i.e. whoever creates AOL for real people, or whatever the heck this thing turns out to be — is going to be really, really rich.
- thedudemabry 14y ago
  I'm similarly impressed. While we can argue about the specificity of several predictions, I can say that I would not have predicted any of them in 2004 other than Programmers Will Be Average and We Will Have A New Online Meeting Place.
- jwdunne 14y ago
  That really stood out for me too. Even more so, the fact Paul Graham is referred to in the prediction just before. PG forms the conclusion of Steve's lisp prediction and also founded a type of community mentioned in the prediction after it.
- S4M 14y ago
  When reading the article, I had the feeling that prediction #6 was actually FaceBook.
  - ipedrazas 14y ago
    same here... Facebook trumps Aol
  - rdrey 14y ago
    or Reddit.
    - ganarajpr 14y ago
      I think its twitter more than facebook.. Facebook is oriented towards connecting friends.. while twitter is oriented towards people with similiar interests..
  - kristaps 14y ago
    That point was one of the easier predictions and vague enough to fit a number of currently popular services, but I'd have to agree that Facebook fits it best.
  - Samuel_Michon 14y ago
    Facebook already existed when this was written. HN was just around the corner and fits a lot better, imo. I figured "you and I" referred to developers and entrepeneurs, not the general public.
    - yen223 14y ago
      I don't think Facebook was big at the time, was it?
      - stinky613 14y ago
        If you were in college in 2004 it was pretty unavoidable
- oinksoft 14y ago
  Prediction #6 is not very ambitious. The only way several new "internet hangouts" would not emerge would be if the internet suddenly had ceased to exist.
- theycallmemorty 14y ago
  Funny, HackerNews is what came to my mind for that point. I assumed by 'you and I' he meant developers/entrepreneurs/hackers. If he was in fact referring to the mainstream, then Twitter would be another great example.
  - GhotiFish 14y ago
    The ambiguity is helping that prediction quiet a bit, wouldn't you say?
L0j1k 14y ago
Impressive.
JDShu 14y ago
Prediction #3 is the only one which I can't see being interpreted as being reasonably accurate. Anybody care to explain why it might be correct?
- gizmo 14y ago
  10 years ago I wrote desktop software with UI threads, background worker threads, network layer threads and various helper threads you spawned on a whim. And so did everybody else. Back then the big innovation to multi-threaded programming was the use of RAII Mutexes[1] to avoid livelock/deadlock scenarios. Fast forward to today. We write complex software for the browser with Javascript front-ends that are completely asynchronous. On the server we have a share-nothing-architecture where hundreds of incoming requests are divided over independent workers. There is still complex multi-threading going on in the database and in the web browser, but most programmers don't have to deal with it anymore. The problem of locks and deadlocks is pretty much a responsibility of the operating system now, much like virtual memory and writing data to the filesystem. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initialization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initial...
- carbuncle 14y ago
  We are doing more "multi-process" programming than "multi-threading". Our systems are designed to scale by increasing the number of processes performing the task at hand, more than having one process with multiple threads to increase concurrency. The programmers try not to think delegate the thread management to the OS, by using multiple processes and MQ in between.
deleted 14y ago
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zalew 14y ago
> Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. these lisp predictions are like the year of linux desktop, aren't they?
hittaruki 14y ago
Status of these predictions in 2013... 1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. What has happened to this idea? 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. github? 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. go? node? 4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. clojure? scala? 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Don't think this happened... 6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. I suppose this happened big time. 7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Thank-god that was wrong! 8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. I am still not paying but am sure a lot of people are. 9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. Hm... 10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average.
- tejaswiy 14y ago
  #1 - JSON and NoSQL databases?
- blablabla123 14y ago
  > XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. What has happened to this idea? I guess Redis and friends solve the problem "Nobody likes to do O/R mapping". >5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Don't think this happened... But a few functional languages more or less made it into the mainstream: Clojure and F#
- _anshulk 14y ago
  #2 probably refers more to heroku than github...
  - hittaruki 14y ago
    You are right, I read his whole description once again... :)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
ipedrazas 14y ago
Anyone willing to write 10 predictions for 2020?
- franze 14y ago
  1) in 2020 most programmers will still be average 2) in 2020 browsers will support a multitude of programming languages natively, most of them functional 3) in 2020 linkedin will be dead 4) in 2020 there will be a huge governmental campaign to teach kids programming, starting in pre-school 5) in 2020 there will be an SVG that is to SVG what HTML5 was to XHTML 6) in 2020 TV will still be mostly watched in 2D 7) in 2020 Steve Ballmer won't be CEO of SonyMicro any longer 8) in 2020 we will finally have an CSS alternative
  - Guillaume86 14y ago
    2) is very optimistic (I wouldn't bet a dollar on it) 8) I'm not sure what you mean with that one, what kind of alternative? (given you seem to exclude transpilers/preprocessors)
    - masklinn 14y ago
      > I'm not sure what you mean with that one, what kind of alternative? I'm guessing one which better handles layouting and modularization. I'm not hopeful though, CSS is way too "good enough", it's probably there to stay and actual layouting features will slowly get (awkwardly) fitted into it[0], meanwhile modularization will likely be left to components. [0] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/ the first two are at least partially supported in all modern browsers, the latter is only supported by IE10.
    - deleted 14y ago
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    - deleted 14y ago
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lifeisstillgood 14y ago
Well, I am going to go and do my predictions for the next ten. Laser guns right up the top !
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  Not sure why I got the downvote - I am serious - Laser guns will change the geo-politics of the world - and business has always followed those changes: * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon * http://www.csbaonline.org/publications/2012/04/changing-the-game-the-promise-of-directed-energy-weapons/ http://www.csbaonline.org/publications/2012/04/changing-the-...
friendly_chap 14y ago
1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though. 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. Github is cool but with all the cheapskate web devs (no offense, I am one of them) I don't think it is _that_ profitable. 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore. 4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. Not in 2010, not even yet, but we are certainly on the road. No surprise considering how shit Java is. 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. 6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. This is such a vague prediction does not even worth mentioning. 7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Happened sooner. 8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. You don't say? They are one of the biggest players out there, even if they are not primarily known for payware but still. 9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. 10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. This makes no sense, but anyway, we are getting better. Slowly though, version control, more languages, testing is infiltrating even some dumber dev companies too. -- I give this guy a mental thumbs up for points 1 and 4, and the cynicism in point 10.
- wwwtyro 14y ago
  2. "hosting open-source web applications" does not really describe GitHub 3. He's not talking about using multiple cores, he's talking about using multiple threads vs (for example) multiple processes. 6. Reddit, Hacker News
  - friendly_chap 14y ago
    2. I think github is the most notable example. 3. Gotta reread that. 6. Oh come on, facebook, youporn, whatever. As I said, too vague.
    - mseebach 14y ago
nehz 14y ago
I believe point #3 describes a paradigm shift from thread-based programming to a more event-based approach (which still uses threads/co-routines) rather then implying that everything will be single threaded
eloisant 14y ago
Considering that Lisp failed to get to the top 10 between 1958 and 2004, it was pretty dump to predict it would suddenly rise to the top.
- friendly_chap 14y ago
  Predicting that a language without a type system is the future is pretty dumb in itself. I give y'all an other one: "cars without brakes are the future".
  - stewbrew 14y ago
    I simply assume that with "type system" you mean "statically typed language" since lisp is strongly typed, which implies having a "type system": bigloo & typed racket demonstrated that static typing & lisp/scheme aren't incompatible. That prediction was rather unlikely to come true, anyway.
    - friendly_chap 14y ago
      It is entirely unscientific, but let me approach this problem from a practical ($$$) angle: A type system is something what effortlessly reveals programming errors before my customers do.
  - experiment0 14y ago
    Well Lisp is dynamically typed and Javascript, Ruby and Python seem to be doing pretty well.
  - wcchandler 14y ago
    Brakes are a complete waste of energy...
  - cdf 14y ago
    Well, not sure about cars, but bicycles without brakes are getting pretty hip...
    - 14y ago
mcgwiz 14y ago
(General response to a trend in the comments.) I believe #2 refers to things like Wordpress.com or CloudFoundry.com. Wikipedia.org might qualify as well. If Discourse.org offers hosted instances, (and they make a lot of revenue), they could qualify too. As far as I know, GitHub never opened their source.
- raylu 14y ago
  Yes, but GitHub makes a lot of money by hosting something that is open-source: git.
lipeno 14y ago
Lol, I remember reading this :)
cekstam 14y ago
Any reason for it not beeing in the web archive? http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/* http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://sites.google.com/site/s...
qompiler 14y ago
10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. Most programmers are average, that's the definition of average. It's like saying in five years most people will still be average.
- deleted 14y ago
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- yen223 14y ago
  "Of course most programmers will still be average, by definition. The problem is that the average level of quality and productivity probably won't have changed all that much." -- from the article.
- vincentkriek 14y ago
  Well, not really. If we look at programmers by skill level and number that skill level from 0-9. If you have 100 "5ers", than the average is 5. And yes, than most programmers are average. If you have 50 "1s" and 50 "9s", the average will still be 5, but no one is average. Then again, I don't think that is what he meant.
moron4hire 14y ago
On the Lisp thing, looking around the programming world in 2004, you didn't see proliferation of functional concepts like you do today. In those days, "functional" meant Lisp, at least popularly. I think the big lesson of Lisp has been disseminated, though, and that is that it is more productive to write code-that-writes-code. But I also think we learned a broader lesson that it's better to not pigeon-hole people down into a single paradigm. So what if Company A uses only the functional bits of your language and Company B uses only the object oriented bits, thus making their code "incompatible". Their code would be incompatible even if they could 100% agree on programming paradigms, naming conventions, API patterns. Because programming is so much NOT the syntax of the language, as long as it is not specifically restrictive.
- stiff 14y ago
  Being a "Lisp" is a very broad category and I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language. I would love to see a list of things that are today considered functional that originated in Lisp, I think there is not that many of them in the end. However, there is a ton of things that have nothing to do with being functional that originated or got popularized by Lisp: garbage collection, lists as the fundamental data structure, dynamic typing,... One could just as well consider it the first "scripting" language, a spiritual predecessor to Python, Ruby, maybe Smalltak to a extent? Many Lisp dialects do not stress the functional part all that much and lots of Lisp code is written in a way that is very imperative. In the end I think many other factors contributed much more to the popularization of functional programming. And if you take Common Lisp as an example of a Lisp, there are still tons of interesting things that are far from being mainstream. Multiple dispatch, conditions system, macros, ...
  - bcoates 14y ago
    I think the common programmer considers first-class functions and closures as 'functional' features. This is from the bad old days when procedural languages didn't usually have these things.
  - martinced 14y ago
    ..."I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language" Even more interesting: why do people call a family of language a language? elisp, for example, certainly doesn't put the emphasis on FP. But Clojure does (although you can use Clojure in a non-functional way). But it's not that much of a surprise: nowadays talks about FP are everywhere, so programmers who think they understand FP use the term for everything. For example you can have Excel spreadsheet having cells which shall always update themselves automatically from the network: like a cell containing the current date. Or a cell containing the current exchange rate between this and that currency. Yet recently on HN in every single thread about Excel you had armies of retards explaining that "Excel was the ultimate functional programming language". People are really that retarded. Even on HN. And it's frankly sad. :(
polskibus 14y ago
standard hindsight bias
tomasien 14y ago
Crazy to see someone talking about PG in 2004 that way (see comments section). I assumed that comment must have come from an HR'er in 2004, but nope. Apparently it was just someone talking about PG and LISP on the Stevey's blog in 2004. Weird.
tocomment 14y ago
Does anyone know why XML was so hyped when it came out? I remember reading article after article about how great it was and how it was going to revolutionize everything. Looking back on it, it all seems kind of silly.
- columbo 14y ago
  > how it was going to revolutionize everything I think it did. The Java->XML->XSLT->HTML or Java->XML->Webservice framework was pretty big news in 2001. It meant you could transfer data between any number of services using the same data set. You could take that XML and send it to a java servlet or you could render it to html using xsl and give it to the users. You could also flat out dump XML and have other services use it. It was the first generally accepted webservice standard done over http. Before XML exploded information was transferred between companies (that I worked for) by moving CSVs around, then putting the csv into the database, then reading the database back out... compared to that xml was an absolute godsend.
- johnward 14y ago
  I still use XML/XSLT daily.
- rwallace 14y ago
  It was that great. It got us away from the era when everybody would make up binary formats to store data, into the era where you can debug by eyeball instead of with a hex dump utility, and use off-the-shelf parsers as a bonus. That's plenty enough revolution for one generation of technology. Everything after that is gravy.
mmiliauskas 14y ago
One weird thing. Site is hosted in sites.google.com, and content is published on 2004, however Google sites launched in 2007, which came from acquisition of JotSpot, which was launched in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sites
- mmiliauskas 14y ago
  My bad, JotSpot existed in 2004, so this might be legit. Spooky accurate predictions though..
  - llimllib 14y ago
    Back in the day stevey rehosted his blog on 3 or 4 different blogging services IIRC.
bjhoops1 14y ago
This is really impressive. Soooo close on the XML database thing - just substitute JSON (which hardly anyone knew anything about in 2004) for XML and he nailed it. Just one great call amongst many here.
bradshaw1965 14y ago
10 year, very lightly hedged, mostly specific prediction is hard. Pretty good job, I think.
snarfy 14y ago
3. Multi-threaded programming With threads as the complexity grows you basically re-invent the OS kernel/scheduler inside your app. You might as well use the real kernel. Multi-process is the way to go.
justin_vanw 14y ago
Lisp will never be popular. Everyone likes to kiss the ass of Lisp, and talk about how transformative and powerful it is, then they go and write a bunch of Python or Ruby or Lua or Perl or anything other than Lisp, because infix is just much much more readable. When was the last time you went to a math class and the professor wasn't using infix notation? Even the Common Lisp Hyperspec has to resort to infix notation to explain things. Look at all the infix notation: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_car_c.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_car_... Otherwise, this is pretty spot on. I would say that XML databases should be replaced with JSON or schemaless databases (there was no json back then) and then this prediction is spot on as well.
- larrywright 14y ago
  Clojure is a Lisp and has been rising in popularity. I don't know if it is in the top 10, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was in the next few years.
  - diego 14y ago
    It's #23 on Github, ahead of Go and Erlang. I think top 10 is a tall order but not impossible. https://github.com/languages/Clojure https://github.com/languages/Clojure
- lkrubner 14y ago
  I got a new job in December. This company mostly uses Ruby and PHP. I was given an assignment for which they scheduled 2 weeks. I wrote the whole thing in Clojure, my new favorite language. I got it done in 1 week (6 days). After I was done, I asked if it was okay if I used Clojure. The folks I work with had no problem with that. They asked were impressed with my speed, part of which I attribute to Clojure. I am the first person in this company to use Clojure, (although there is a small team in London that now uses Scala, and there is an official goal to move toward JVM technologies). I use it because it lets me work very fast. I have spent many years writing Ruby and PHP. I used to use them because I thought they were fast, and Java was slow. But one's point of reference shapes one's preferences. Let me put it like this: I started using PHP in 1999. At that time, I felt strongly that this was the easiest way to write web apps. Java was verbose. The Struts framework was monstrous to the point of being offensive. Perl was ugly. I had never heard of Ruby. I became an evangelist for PHP, trying to convince companies that its use would make web development much more pleasant and faster. Later I did some Ruby On Rails development. I like this language, though I have never understood the smug sense of superiority of some Rails developers, especially in their attitude toward PHP. In my mind, these are 2 similar languages with slightly different strengths and weaknesses, but at roughly the same level of power. PHP was for a long time a Wild West of development. Every developer built their own CMS and then used it for everything. At some point after 2006, this changed. Ruby On Rails was a huge influence. By 2008, the only jobs I could find, for either Ruby or PHP, were using monolithic frameworks: Rails, Symfony, Drupal or Cake. I found myself bogged down reading endless documentation. I recall losing whole days trying to track down a bug in Symfony and then finding it was because of a setting in an obscure YAML file. The situation was not as bad as Struts, but I felt that somehow the world had taken a wrong turn. Once upon a time lightweight scripting languages offered freedom from Java and Struts -- and when you make that comparison, both Ruby and PHP seem like heaven. Bruce Eckel summed up the spirit of the change here: "But for someone who has invested Herculean effort to use EJBs just to baby-sit a database, Rails must seem like the essence of simplicity. The understandable reaction for such a person is that everything they did in Java was a waste of time, and that Ruby is the one true path." http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons: 1.) the language 2.) the eco-system The 2 work in combination of course. When I got done with my 2 week assignment, which I did in 1 week, I ran "lein uberjar" and gave a single binary to the sysadmin, so he could roll it out to the production machines. He asked where the other files were. I said "There are no other files, all the HTML, CSS, Javascript, images and code are in this one file." He asked how to start it. I gave him a simple 1 line startup command. He started it up and was amazed. He said, "That's it?" I said, "That's it." He said "Why can't they all be this easy?" He was used to dealing with complicated Capistrano and Jenkins commands for roll-outs. To me, Clojure has that simplicity, speed and elegance that I was looking for in 1999, when I stumbled on PHP and decided PHP was the wave of the future. I suspect the Great Age Of Lisp is still ahead of us. Stuff like Clojure makes me think there is a vast potential here, still waiting to be unlocked.
habosa 14y ago
This is a pretty incredible list of predictions. I'm not just impressed at how 'correct' some are, but also that these predictions turned out to be so important to the tech industry. It's interesting how everyone has a different take on #2. When I read it, I thought of Heroku and I think that's pretty close. With the git integration many people do `git push github && git push heroku` which is pretty cool. As fir #10, that's not good news for all of the "Rockstars Only" job postings.
- raylu 14y ago
  I think github.com is the best example of #2.
epa 14y ago
Good insights.. he was right on a lot of stuff.
martinced 14y ago
Reading Paul Graham's "beating the average" I can't help think that Steve Yegge's prediction #5 and #10 are mutually exclusive: Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Prediction #10: In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. There's no way any Lisp dialect could reach top ten if most programmers are still average ; )
- jonpeda 14y ago
  ahem. https://www.google.com/search?q=being+the+averagest https://www.google.com/search?q=being+the+averagest https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averagest https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averages...
Mahn 14y ago
Thank god JSON has taken over XML. I'm sure XML still has its uses, but it simply is way too verbose, and frankly I have yet to find a data structure which representation fits better in a xml like format (besides html, obviously)
clarkmoody 14y ago
Wow, I really was expecting at least one of these comments to have meaningful discussion of each of his predictions with facts/figures. Instead, half of the comments are arguing about Lisp and the other half about XML / JSON.
shitlord 14y ago
> Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Every time I hear that, I always think of "abcd will be the year of the Linux desktop". I want it to happen, but at the same time, I realize how absurd I am being.
interviewer 14y ago
Steve Yegge is usually a talented and entertaining writer. Having said that, his strengths lie in writing about computer science and far less in actually creating real systems. These predictions aren't very good (as time as shown) and are on par with the poor judgment he exercised in bashing his former employer in a 'private' post.
bhaik 14y ago
Impressive.
zero445 14y ago
wow,some of them were really true.
philsnow 14y ago
I came late to this thread, but I want to add an item to Stevey's list of "trust tests" for prediction #2, "someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications": SOVEREIGNTY: I would strongly prefer outsourcing to large companies with C* executives, boards, and/or founders who really "believe" in the mission of the company, have complete financial control, and are generally unlikely to even need or want to sell out, and generally unlikely to ever be vulnerable to a buy-out. When making investments of any kind in an entity that is made up of individuals, I'm increasingly wary of the cupidity of those individuals. Very soon I'm going to have to decide whether to send my kids to private schools or public schools (and switching costs are high, so I want to get it right the first time), and it strikes me that private schools may be less likely to change drastically over the course of 8-12 years than a public school.
- jonpeda 14y ago
  > switching costs are high Why? switching to private school is expensive. Switching from is not. In the public system, schools change every 3-5 years anyway. " and it strikes me that private schools may be less likely to change drastically over the course of 8-12 years than a public school." Why? public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates.
  - philsnow 14y ago
    > switching to private school is expensive Well, _paying_ for it is expensive in terms of money, it's not the switching that costs money generally. The switching costs I'm referring to are "social" ones. I don't want to shop my kids around schools if I can avoid it, because each time they'll have to make new friends and be "the new kid" for 1-2 years. In the public system, you change schools twice, elementary -> middle and middle -> high school (or just once, k-8 "middle school" -> high school), and each time you generally know lots of other kids because schools are arranged as "feeders", and a given high school class is made up of cohorts from each of the feeders. > public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates. Public schools are beholden to state budgets, and I don't like they choices that were made a couple decades ago when _I_ was in public schools (no music or "arts" education at all in my k-6 school), so I shudder to think of what's going to happen nowadays. State budgets fluctuate along with the political climate. That's my thinking, anyway.
jonpeda 14y ago
> Heck, they'd probably like someone to outsource their email, too. 2004 -- Was this before or after Gmail launched on April 1?

457 points by S4M 14y ago

kushti 14y ago

# 6,9,10 are ok. Other predictions failed

icemelt8 14y ago

Wow some of them are really spot on!

rplnt 14y ago
And some are not. Yet?

swah 14y ago

"Important Note: the predictions themselves don't matter! Most of them are probably wrong. The point of the exercise is the exercise itself, not in what results. You should try this experiment yourself — it may show you things you're thinking that you weren't really aware of. And other people might find it interesting reading, even if there are factual errors or whatever"

xiaoma 14y ago

This really is an impressive display of foresight. It appears that all the reading Steve mentioned doing paid off. The act of discussing his predictions here on HN is foretold in prediction #6. And those that were off, were still pretty warm.

swah 14y ago
Whoever solves this — i.e. whoever creates AOL for real people, or whatever the heck this thing turns out to be — is going to be really, really rich.
thedudemabry 14y ago
I'm similarly impressed. While we can argue about the specificity of several predictions, I can say that I would not have predicted any of them in 2004 other than Programmers Will Be Average and We Will Have A New Online Meeting Place.
jwdunne 14y ago
That really stood out for me too. Even more so, the fact Paul Graham is referred to in the prediction just before. PG forms the conclusion of Steve's lisp prediction and also founded a type of community mentioned in the prediction after it.
S4M 14y ago
When reading the article, I had the feeling that prediction #6 was actually FaceBook.
- ipedrazas 14y ago
  same here... Facebook trumps Aol
- rdrey 14y ago
  or Reddit.
  - ganarajpr 14y ago
    I think its twitter more than facebook.. Facebook is oriented towards connecting friends.. while twitter is oriented towards people with similiar interests..
- kristaps 14y ago
  That point was one of the easier predictions and vague enough to fit a number of currently popular services, but I'd have to agree that Facebook fits it best.
- Samuel_Michon 14y ago
  Facebook already existed when this was written. HN was just around the corner and fits a lot better, imo. I figured "you and I" referred to developers and entrepeneurs, not the general public.
  - yen223 14y ago
    I don't think Facebook was big at the time, was it?
    - stinky613 14y ago
      If you were in college in 2004 it was pretty unavoidable
oinksoft 14y ago
Prediction #6 is not very ambitious. The only way several new "internet hangouts" would not emerge would be if the internet suddenly had ceased to exist.
theycallmemorty 14y ago
Funny, HackerNews is what came to my mind for that point. I assumed by 'you and I' he meant developers/entrepreneurs/hackers. If he was in fact referring to the mainstream, then Twitter would be another great example.
- GhotiFish 14y ago
  The ambiguity is helping that prediction quiet a bit, wouldn't you say?

L0j1k 14y ago

Impressive.

JDShu 14y ago

Prediction #3 is the only one which I can't see being interpreted as being reasonably accurate. Anybody care to explain why it might be correct?

gizmo 14y ago
10 years ago I wrote desktop software with UI threads, background worker threads, network layer threads and various helper threads you spawned on a whim. And so did everybody else. Back then the big innovation to multi-threaded programming was the use of RAII Mutexes[1] to avoid livelock/deadlock scenarios. Fast forward to today. We write complex software for the browser with Javascript front-ends that are completely asynchronous. On the server we have a share-nothing-architecture where hundreds of incoming requests are divided over independent workers. There is still complex multi-threading going on in the database and in the web browser, but most programmers don't have to deal with it anymore. The problem of locks and deadlocks is pretty much a responsibility of the operating system now, much like virtual memory and writing data to the filesystem. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initialization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_Acquisition_Is_Initial...
carbuncle 14y ago
We are doing more "multi-process" programming than "multi-threading". Our systems are designed to scale by increasing the number of processes performing the task at hand, more than having one process with multiple threads to increase concurrency. The programmers try not to think delegate the thread management to the OS, by using multiple processes and MQ in between.

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zalew 14y ago

> Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. these lisp predictions are like the year of linux desktop, aren't they?

hittaruki 14y ago

Status of these predictions in 2013... 1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. What has happened to this idea? 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. github? 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. go? node? 4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. clojure? scala? 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Don't think this happened... 6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. I suppose this happened big time. 7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Thank-god that was wrong! 8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. I am still not paying but am sure a lot of people are. 9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. Hm... 10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average.

tejaswiy 14y ago
#1 - JSON and NoSQL databases?
blablabla123 14y ago
> XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. What has happened to this idea? I guess Redis and friends solve the problem "Nobody likes to do O/R mapping". >5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Don't think this happened... But a few functional languages more or less made it into the mainstream: Clojure and F#
_anshulk 14y ago
#2 probably refers more to heroku than github...
- hittaruki 14y ago
  You are right, I read his whole description once again... :)
- deleted 14y ago
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ipedrazas 14y ago

Anyone willing to write 10 predictions for 2020?

franze 14y ago
1) in 2020 most programmers will still be average 2) in 2020 browsers will support a multitude of programming languages natively, most of them functional 3) in 2020 linkedin will be dead 4) in 2020 there will be a huge governmental campaign to teach kids programming, starting in pre-school 5) in 2020 there will be an SVG that is to SVG what HTML5 was to XHTML 6) in 2020 TV will still be mostly watched in 2D 7) in 2020 Steve Ballmer won't be CEO of SonyMicro any longer 8) in 2020 we will finally have an CSS alternative
- Guillaume86 14y ago
  2) is very optimistic (I wouldn't bet a dollar on it) 8) I'm not sure what you mean with that one, what kind of alternative? (given you seem to exclude transpilers/preprocessors)
  - masklinn 14y ago
    > I'm not sure what you mean with that one, what kind of alternative? I'm guessing one which better handles layouting and modularization. I'm not hopeful though, CSS is way too "good enough", it's probably there to stay and actual layouting features will slowly get (awkwardly) fitted into it[0], meanwhile modularization will likely be left to components. [0] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-flexbox/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/ http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/ the first two are at least partially supported in all modern browsers, the latter is only supported by IE10.
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lifeisstillgood 14y ago

Well, I am going to go and do my predictions for the next ten. Laser guns right up the top !

lifeisstillgood 14y ago
Not sure why I got the downvote - I am serious - Laser guns will change the geo-politics of the world - and business has always followed those changes: * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon * http://www.csbaonline.org/publications/2012/04/changing-the-game-the-promise-of-directed-energy-weapons/ http://www.csbaonline.org/publications/2012/04/changing-the-...

friendly_chap 14y ago

1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though. 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. Github is cool but with all the cheapskate web devs (no offense, I am one of them) I don't think it is _that_ profitable. 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore. 4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. Not in 2010, not even yet, but we are certainly on the road. No surprise considering how shit Java is. 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. 6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. This is such a vague prediction does not even worth mentioning. 7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Happened sooner. 8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. You don't say? They are one of the biggest players out there, even if they are not primarily known for payware but still. 9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. 10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. This makes no sense, but anyway, we are getting better. Slowly though, version control, more languages, testing is infiltrating even some dumber dev companies too. -- I give this guy a mental thumbs up for points 1 and 4, and the cynicism in point 10.

wwwtyro 14y ago
2. "hosting open-source web applications" does not really describe GitHub 3. He's not talking about using multiple cores, he's talking about using multiple threads vs (for example) multiple processes. 6. Reddit, Hacker News
- friendly_chap 14y ago
  2. I think github is the most notable example. 3. Gotta reread that. 6. Oh come on, facebook, youporn, whatever. As I said, too vague.
  - mseebach 14y ago

nehz 14y ago

I believe point #3 describes a paradigm shift from thread-based programming to a more event-based approach (which still uses threads/co-routines) rather then implying that everything will be single threaded

eloisant 14y ago

Considering that Lisp failed to get to the top 10 between 1958 and 2004, it was pretty dump to predict it would suddenly rise to the top.

friendly_chap 14y ago
Predicting that a language without a type system is the future is pretty dumb in itself. I give y'all an other one: "cars without brakes are the future".
- stewbrew 14y ago
  I simply assume that with "type system" you mean "statically typed language" since lisp is strongly typed, which implies having a "type system": bigloo & typed racket demonstrated that static typing & lisp/scheme aren't incompatible. That prediction was rather unlikely to come true, anyway.
  - friendly_chap 14y ago
    It is entirely unscientific, but let me approach this problem from a practical ($$$) angle: A type system is something what effortlessly reveals programming errors before my customers do.
- experiment0 14y ago
  Well Lisp is dynamically typed and Javascript, Ruby and Python seem to be doing pretty well.
- wcchandler 14y ago
  Brakes are a complete waste of energy...
- cdf 14y ago
  Well, not sure about cars, but bicycles without brakes are getting pretty hip...
  - 14y ago

mcgwiz 14y ago

(General response to a trend in the comments.) I believe #2 refers to things like Wordpress.com or CloudFoundry.com. Wikipedia.org might qualify as well. If Discourse.org offers hosted instances, (and they make a lot of revenue), they could qualify too. As far as I know, GitHub never opened their source.

raylu 14y ago
Yes, but GitHub makes a lot of money by hosting something that is open-source: git.

lipeno 14y ago

Lol, I remember reading this :)

cekstam 14y ago

Any reason for it not beeing in the web archive? http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/* http://web.archive.org/web/*/https://sites.google.com/site/s...

qompiler 14y ago

10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. Most programmers are average, that's the definition of average. It's like saying in five years most people will still be average.

deleted 14y ago
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yen223 14y ago
"Of course most programmers will still be average, by definition. The problem is that the average level of quality and productivity probably won't have changed all that much." -- from the article.
vincentkriek 14y ago
Well, not really. If we look at programmers by skill level and number that skill level from 0-9. If you have 100 "5ers", than the average is 5. And yes, than most programmers are average. If you have 50 "1s" and 50 "9s", the average will still be 5, but no one is average. Then again, I don't think that is what he meant.

moron4hire 14y ago

On the Lisp thing, looking around the programming world in 2004, you didn't see proliferation of functional concepts like you do today. In those days, "functional" meant Lisp, at least popularly. I think the big lesson of Lisp has been disseminated, though, and that is that it is more productive to write code-that-writes-code. But I also think we learned a broader lesson that it's better to not pigeon-hole people down into a single paradigm. So what if Company A uses only the functional bits of your language and Company B uses only the object oriented bits, thus making their code "incompatible". Their code would be incompatible even if they could 100% agree on programming paradigms, naming conventions, API patterns. Because programming is so much NOT the syntax of the language, as long as it is not specifically restrictive.

stiff 14y ago
Being a "Lisp" is a very broad category and I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language. I would love to see a list of things that are today considered functional that originated in Lisp, I think there is not that many of them in the end. However, there is a ton of things that have nothing to do with being functional that originated or got popularized by Lisp: garbage collection, lists as the fundamental data structure, dynamic typing,... One could just as well consider it the first "scripting" language, a spiritual predecessor to Python, Ruby, maybe Smalltak to a extent? Many Lisp dialects do not stress the functional part all that much and lots of Lisp code is written in a way that is very imperative. In the end I think many other factors contributed much more to the popularization of functional programming. And if you take Common Lisp as an example of a Lisp, there are still tons of interesting things that are far from being mainstream. Multiple dispatch, conditions system, macros, ...
- bcoates 14y ago
  I think the common programmer considers first-class functions and closures as 'functional' features. This is from the bad old days when procedural languages didn't usually have these things.
- martinced 14y ago
  ..."I always wondered about people calling Lisp a functional language" Even more interesting: why do people call a family of language a language? elisp, for example, certainly doesn't put the emphasis on FP. But Clojure does (although you can use Clojure in a non-functional way). But it's not that much of a surprise: nowadays talks about FP are everywhere, so programmers who think they understand FP use the term for everything. For example you can have Excel spreadsheet having cells which shall always update themselves automatically from the network: like a cell containing the current date. Or a cell containing the current exchange rate between this and that currency. Yet recently on HN in every single thread about Excel you had armies of retards explaining that "Excel was the ultimate functional programming language". People are really that retarded. Even on HN. And it's frankly sad. :(

polskibus 14y ago

standard hindsight bias

tomasien 14y ago

Crazy to see someone talking about PG in 2004 that way (see comments section). I assumed that comment must have come from an HR'er in 2004, but nope. Apparently it was just someone talking about PG and LISP on the Stevey's blog in 2004. Weird.

tocomment 14y ago

Does anyone know why XML was so hyped when it came out? I remember reading article after article about how great it was and how it was going to revolutionize everything. Looking back on it, it all seems kind of silly.

columbo 14y ago
> how it was going to revolutionize everything I think it did. The Java->XML->XSLT->HTML or Java->XML->Webservice framework was pretty big news in 2001. It meant you could transfer data between any number of services using the same data set. You could take that XML and send it to a java servlet or you could render it to html using xsl and give it to the users. You could also flat out dump XML and have other services use it. It was the first generally accepted webservice standard done over http. Before XML exploded information was transferred between companies (that I worked for) by moving CSVs around, then putting the csv into the database, then reading the database back out... compared to that xml was an absolute godsend.
johnward 14y ago
I still use XML/XSLT daily.
rwallace 14y ago
It was that great. It got us away from the era when everybody would make up binary formats to store data, into the era where you can debug by eyeball instead of with a hex dump utility, and use off-the-shelf parsers as a bonus. That's plenty enough revolution for one generation of technology. Everything after that is gravy.

mmiliauskas 14y ago

One weird thing. Site is hosted in sites.google.com, and content is published on 2004, however Google sites launched in 2007, which came from acquisition of JotSpot, which was launched in 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Sites

mmiliauskas 14y ago
My bad, JotSpot existed in 2004, so this might be legit. Spooky accurate predictions though..
- llimllib 14y ago
  Back in the day stevey rehosted his blog on 3 or 4 different blogging services IIRC.

bjhoops1 14y ago

This is really impressive. Soooo close on the XML database thing - just substitute JSON (which hardly anyone knew anything about in 2004) for XML and he nailed it. Just one great call amongst many here.

bradshaw1965 14y ago

10 year, very lightly hedged, mostly specific prediction is hard. Pretty good job, I think.

snarfy 14y ago

3. Multi-threaded programming With threads as the complexity grows you basically re-invent the OS kernel/scheduler inside your app. You might as well use the real kernel. Multi-process is the way to go.

justin_vanw 14y ago

Lisp will never be popular. Everyone likes to kiss the ass of Lisp, and talk about how transformative and powerful it is, then they go and write a bunch of Python or Ruby or Lua or Perl or anything other than Lisp, because infix is just much much more readable. When was the last time you went to a math class and the professor wasn't using infix notation? Even the Common Lisp Hyperspec has to resort to infix notation to explain things. Look at all the infix notation: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_car_c.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_car_... Otherwise, this is pretty spot on. I would say that XML databases should be replaced with JSON or schemaless databases (there was no json back then) and then this prediction is spot on as well.

larrywright 14y ago
Clojure is a Lisp and has been rising in popularity. I don't know if it is in the top 10, but I wouldn't be shocked if it was in the next few years.
- diego 14y ago
  It's #23 on Github, ahead of Go and Erlang. I think top 10 is a tall order but not impossible. https://github.com/languages/Clojure https://github.com/languages/Clojure
lkrubner 14y ago
I got a new job in December. This company mostly uses Ruby and PHP. I was given an assignment for which they scheduled 2 weeks. I wrote the whole thing in Clojure, my new favorite language. I got it done in 1 week (6 days). After I was done, I asked if it was okay if I used Clojure. The folks I work with had no problem with that. They asked were impressed with my speed, part of which I attribute to Clojure. I am the first person in this company to use Clojure, (although there is a small team in London that now uses Scala, and there is an official goal to move toward JVM technologies). I use it because it lets me work very fast. I have spent many years writing Ruby and PHP. I used to use them because I thought they were fast, and Java was slow. But one's point of reference shapes one's preferences. Let me put it like this: I started using PHP in 1999. At that time, I felt strongly that this was the easiest way to write web apps. Java was verbose. The Struts framework was monstrous to the point of being offensive. Perl was ugly. I had never heard of Ruby. I became an evangelist for PHP, trying to convince companies that its use would make web development much more pleasant and faster. Later I did some Ruby On Rails development. I like this language, though I have never understood the smug sense of superiority of some Rails developers, especially in their attitude toward PHP. In my mind, these are 2 similar languages with slightly different strengths and weaknesses, but at roughly the same level of power. PHP was for a long time a Wild West of development. Every developer built their own CMS and then used it for everything. At some point after 2006, this changed. Ruby On Rails was a huge influence. By 2008, the only jobs I could find, for either Ruby or PHP, were using monolithic frameworks: Rails, Symfony, Drupal or Cake. I found myself bogged down reading endless documentation. I recall losing whole days trying to track down a bug in Symfony and then finding it was because of a setting in an obscure YAML file. The situation was not as bad as Struts, but I felt that somehow the world had taken a wrong turn. Once upon a time lightweight scripting languages offered freedom from Java and Struts -- and when you make that comparison, both Ruby and PHP seem like heaven. Bruce Eckel summed up the spirit of the change here: "But for someone who has invested Herculean effort to use EJBs just to baby-sit a database, Rails must seem like the essence of simplicity. The understandable reaction for such a person is that everything they did in Java was a waste of time, and that Ruby is the one true path." http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 To me, Clojure is interesting for 2 different reasons: 1.) the language 2.) the eco-system The 2 work in combination of course. When I got done with my 2 week assignment, which I did in 1 week, I ran "lein uberjar" and gave a single binary to the sysadmin, so he could roll it out to the production machines. He asked where the other files were. I said "There are no other files, all the HTML, CSS, Javascript, images and code are in this one file." He asked how to start it. I gave him a simple 1 line startup command. He started it up and was amazed. He said, "That's it?" I said, "That's it." He said "Why can't they all be this easy?" He was used to dealing with complicated Capistrano and Jenkins commands for roll-outs. To me, Clojure has that simplicity, speed and elegance that I was looking for in 1999, when I stumbled on PHP and decided PHP was the wave of the future. I suspect the Great Age Of Lisp is still ahead of us. Stuff like Clojure makes me think there is a vast potential here, still waiting to be unlocked.

habosa 14y ago

This is a pretty incredible list of predictions. I'm not just impressed at how 'correct' some are, but also that these predictions turned out to be so important to the tech industry. It's interesting how everyone has a different take on #2. When I read it, I thought of Heroku and I think that's pretty close. With the git integration many people do `git push github && git push heroku` which is pretty cool. As fir #10, that's not good news for all of the "Rockstars Only" job postings.

raylu 14y ago
I think github.com is the best example of #2.

epa 14y ago

Good insights.. he was right on a lot of stuff.

martinced 14y ago

Reading Paul Graham's "beating the average" I can't help think that Steve Yegge's prediction #5 and #10 are mutually exclusive: Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Prediction #10: In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. There's no way any Lisp dialect could reach top ten if most programmers are still average ; )

jonpeda 14y ago
ahem. https://www.google.com/search?q=being+the+averagest https://www.google.com/search?q=being+the+averagest https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averagest https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/being-the-averages...

Mahn 14y ago

Thank god JSON has taken over XML. I'm sure XML still has its uses, but it simply is way too verbose, and frankly I have yet to find a data structure which representation fits better in a xml like format (besides html, obviously)

clarkmoody 14y ago

Wow, I really was expecting at least one of these comments to have meaningful discussion of each of his predictions with facts/figures. Instead, half of the comments are arguing about Lisp and the other half about XML / JSON.

shitlord 14y ago

> Prediction #5: Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Every time I hear that, I always think of "abcd will be the year of the Linux desktop". I want it to happen, but at the same time, I realize how absurd I am being.

interviewer 14y ago

Steve Yegge is usually a talented and entertaining writer. Having said that, his strengths lie in writing about computer science and far less in actually creating real systems. These predictions aren't very good (as time as shown) and are on par with the poor judgment he exercised in bashing his former employer in a 'private' post.

bhaik 14y ago

Impressive.

zero445 14y ago

wow,some of them were really true.

philsnow 14y ago

I came late to this thread, but I want to add an item to Stevey's list of "trust tests" for prediction #2, "someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications": SOVEREIGNTY: I would strongly prefer outsourcing to large companies with C* executives, boards, and/or founders who really "believe" in the mission of the company, have complete financial control, and are generally unlikely to even need or want to sell out, and generally unlikely to ever be vulnerable to a buy-out. When making investments of any kind in an entity that is made up of individuals, I'm increasingly wary of the cupidity of those individuals. Very soon I'm going to have to decide whether to send my kids to private schools or public schools (and switching costs are high, so I want to get it right the first time), and it strikes me that private schools may be less likely to change drastically over the course of 8-12 years than a public school.

jonpeda 14y ago
> switching costs are high Why? switching to private school is expensive. Switching from is not. In the public system, schools change every 3-5 years anyway. " and it strikes me that private schools may be less likely to change drastically over the course of 8-12 years than a public school." Why? public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates.
- philsnow 14y ago
  > switching to private school is expensive Well, _paying_ for it is expensive in terms of money, it's not the switching that costs money generally. The switching costs I'm referring to are "social" ones. I don't want to shop my kids around schools if I can avoid it, because each time they'll have to make new friends and be "the new kid" for 1-2 years. In the public system, you change schools twice, elementary -> middle and middle -> high school (or just once, k-8 "middle school" -> high school), and each time you generally know lots of other kids because schools are arranged as "feeders", and a given high school class is made up of cohorts from each of the feeders. > public schools change slow and ploddingly, after long tedious debates. Public schools are beholden to state budgets, and I don't like they choices that were made a couple decades ago when _I_ was in public schools (no music or "arts" education at all in my k-6 school), so I shudder to think of what's going to happen nowadays. State budgets fluctuate along with the political climate. That's my thinking, anyway.

jonpeda 14y ago

> Heck, they'd probably like someone to outsource their email, too. 2004 -- Was this before or after Gmail launched on April 1?