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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 w

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
    Github is not an open source webapp. It's a closed source web app that hosts other people's open source apps (web and not).
    - Noxchi 14y ago
      Github hosts git repositories. Git is open source.
      - mseebach 14y ago
        Github does a metric f%ckton more than hosting git repositories.
  - CodeCube 14y ago
    I think for #1, there are a number of hosting providers that match this description, such as Dreamhost, that offer a number of open source web apps that you can install with a single click. They manage them, upgrade them, back them up ... all you gotta do is pay them. That being said, GitHub does indeed match the description, though I think people are thinking about the code they are hosting for other people ... but I think where they fit the description is with the fact that they are hosting Git for you (and making some money through enterprise services).
  - ImprovedSilence 14y ago
    >> 6. Oh come on, facebook, youporn, whatever. As I said, too vague. Yeah, so he didn't call out a specific "type" of socializing, or draw up the wireframe for facebook here. But he just recognized there is a huge trend of people wanting to share their lives and communicate in near real time. I think he nailed it. Facebook and twiiter are just that. Even look at his move example. These days, you watch you movie or TV show, then laugh and comment on it with your friends not in the theater, but on facebook or twitter. I'd say he NAILED that prediction.
    - doomlaser 14y ago
      Facebook already existed with over a million users when he wrote this.
nos4A2 14y ago
I think on point 2, he meant a hoster like heroku or AWS? On point 6, its reddit (BBS for this gen), point 8, google drive, android apps, play store etc, point 9, I think the iPad counts :) Overall quite spot on i'd say..
seanmcdirmid 14y ago
> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Thank god we dodged that bullet. I'm just glad people see XML for what it really is (useful, but not that useful). > Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore. The problem is multi-threaded has never really took off, even with all the cores we have today. There is still no silverbullet to harnessing parallelism. > Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. Apple's profits on laptop sales (not other iOS devices) exceed those of HP, Lenovo, and Dell (everyone else being dead). Apple has been in no hurry to capture the unit shipped crown (and if we count iPads, they are already there). > In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. A tautology if I ever heard one.
- friendly_chap 14y ago
  > useful, but not that useful + 1 > Apple's profits With all respect, I have hard time seeing Apple laptops outside the US. Not counting some fanboys who acquired the taste trough some snob blogs.
  - MrScruff 14y ago
    With all respect, I have hard time seeing Apple laptops outside the US. Indeed. And where I am (also outside the US) I have a hard time seeing non-Apple laptops. Anecdotal evidence isn't really that useful when we're talking about global trends. Not counting some fanboys who acquired the taste trough some snob blogs. Making statements like this cause you come across as overly emotionally invested in your platform, and make others less likely to take your arguments seriously.
    - friendly_chap 14y ago
      > Emotional investemented No. I happen to use anything. I am not against Apple, I am against the Apple fanboyism. And any type of fanboyism. > Anecdotal evidence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system... "For example, most desktop and laptop computers use Microsoft Windows"
ghshephard 14y ago
"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." This is one he nailed - Facebook.
- dools 14y ago
  More like reddit, no? Or hacker news ;)
- Wilya 14y ago
  You could repeat the same prediction every year, and you'd probably be right everytime.
  - rmc 14y ago
    Nah, mainstream social networks are new.
    - unalone 14y ago
      Yeah, if you're living a decade ago. By 2005, MySpace was such a big deal that if you were a student without one, you'd feel like you were missing out on something important socially, and by 2008, Facebook had pretty much everybody, including grandparents, as a user. Nowadays the center is shifting again, and most of the people I know have started using Tumblr as their social locus, but it probably won't overtake FB. I'd predict something new coming up in the next year or two that ends up overtaking Facebook in market share, but its approach will have to be highly insightful and unusual, nothing like what I've seen yet online. (Path comes the closest, but Path's reliance on smartphones kills their audience; I still have friends without smartphones and I'd never use a platform that shuts out friends for their consumer decisions.)
      - KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
        Read the title, this is from 2004, which makes it incredibly prescient. Even Zuckerberg didn't realize what a big deal FB was in 2004.
Nursie 14y ago
The XML things is quite amusing, given how far out of favour XML went. XML has now failed hard AFAICT. But I can agree the spirit of the prediction lives on in the form NoSQL and JSON.
- jiggy2011 14y ago
  Has it failed? Or have people just stopped trying to shoehorn it everywhere? There are cases where XML is a great format. For example in the past I wrote a system for interfacing with a government department. The thing was an epic of about 30 different schemas, however being able to actually look at a concrete schema for specification and actually be able to test against it was invaluable. Trying to build that thing with JSON would have driven me to tears.
  - Nursie 14y ago
    Well, perhaps it's not fair to say XML itself has failed, but the idea of XML as the data format to end all data formats seems to have fallen flat on its arse. I too like the ability to validate XML against a schema and found it invaluable when dealing with a set of (needlessly) complex ant-plugins a couple of years back.
- Ingaz 14y ago
  XML is not about "<" and ">" everywhere. XML, JSON, MUMPS are semantically equivalent.
  - jonpeda 14y ago
    XML is far more structured than JSON.
    - Ingaz 14y ago
      Yes. But in fact: you add javascript - you have all strictness and structure of XML.
dools 14y ago
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. I think he means more like wordpress.com, WPEngine and those ilk. Those are currently the most lucrative, but there are other examples of businesses monetising open source by hosting it.
- friendly_chap 14y ago
  That's right, much clearer now. And yes, there is indeed shitload of money in that market.
- johndavidback 14y ago
  I think more specifically he means things like Heroku or Modulus.
  - leoedin 14y ago
    I'm not sure if that's what he means. The discussion of the point specifically mentions applications like bug trackers and wikis - not software that tends to be developed in house. Heroku is generally used for hosting applications that you wrote, rather than for hosting open source stacks developed by others (e.g. phpBB or MediaWiki). Saying that, it all falls under the general trend of providing system administration as a service. Given how much ongoing effort is required to maintain secure, up to date and efficient servers, this is probably a good thing.
    - johndavidback 14y ago
      That's very true, good point. I that this was a case of being mostly right and not realizing just how right he is in certain respects: > most small development shops would pay a monthly fee not to have to administer the apps themselves. and > But would an external dev team trust some big company like Amazon with with their intellectual property? and > So I predict that someone will come along and offer an innovation hosting service, and make a lot of money off it. OP had his finger on the pulse of tech, though, that much is certain.
f1codz 14y ago
> Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. On contrary, for me this one was one of the strongest predictions. In my opinion, predictions should be taken in spirit and not by letter. Looking at the rise of Clojure, i dare say that was a great foresight.
jonaldomo 14y ago
_that_ profitable??? The company I work for pays $250 a year for Github Enterprise per developer for about 400 developers... That is just one company. 100k/year! They are thinking about extending it to all 2,000 developers. A few months ago they raised $100 million!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  - bazzargh 14y ago
    Source? According to Scott Chacon himself, it was profitable even back in 2010. http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/github-one-million/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/github-one-million/ Or this: http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/news/github-gets-100-million-investment http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/news/github-gets-100-million-inve... Announcing the investment on the GitHub blog, CEO Tom Preston-Warner admitted it wasn’t that they necessarily needed it: “Our company has been profitable for years, is growing fast, and doesn’t need money. So why bother? Because we want to be better. We want to build the best products.”
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      Ah, sorry. I thought they were still in start-up mode. It does seem a bit early for them to be turning a profit; I hope they are investing enough.
      - nullymcnull 14y ago
        So, you were assuming that they weren't making a profit based on some sort of gut feeling that they were "still in start-up mode", but you used quite absolute language suggesting personal knowledge of the state of their books.
        seanmcdirmid 14y ago
        Why the heck would GitHub take $100 million in investment and still push for earning a profit every quarter? Does it make any sense to you? Now you can see why I'm confused.
derefr 14y ago
> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. I don't know about hard. I can now imagine a day where Clojure is the predominant JVM language--whereas if you told me five years ago a Lisp would be even as popular as Clojure is now, I would have scoffed. Now, the by 2010 part is wrong, indeed. But I see these predictions as being more about acceleration than current velocity.
- PommeDeTerre 14y ago
  I think you're overestimating the popularity of Clojure. While it's not as totally obscure as many other Lisp, Scheme or Lisp-like language implementations, it's not very widely used at all. Its penetration is minimal, even compared to Scala (which has seen much more significant usage, but still pales in comparison to Java). While Clojure is a step in a better direction, I don't think it's gaining traction all that quickly. There's a whole lot of existing Java and Scala code that would need to be completely discarded or ignored in order for Clojure's usage to be considered as having any impact.
RyanMcGreal 14y ago
> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though. JSON is basically XML with 50% less bullshit. It does less but it does it so much more elegantly than XML - and has the further benefit of a syntax similar to that of structured data in such languages as Javascript (duh), Python and Ruby - that it was a shoo-in to squeeze XML out of most non-enterprise uses, at least on the data transfer format side. However, to this day most data still resides in SQL databases, which have the net advantages of speed, stability and reliability that come from long lead time. What has changed is that object-relational mapping has gotten vastly better than it was in 2004, so programmers can mostly enjoy the best of both worlds. There's also the fact that SQL is an easy enough DSL to understand, read and write that it isn't a barrier to use even in edge cases where ORMs fall down.
- SonicSoul 14y ago
  > object-relational mapping has gotten vastly better than it was in 2004 Maybe so, but it still seems like it's only good for prototyping. With each new version of ORM i get excited and try to implement it, but sooner or later it comes to bite me in the ass, and long term maintenance becomes more painful than not using ORM with all the low level hacks that need to be added and tricky management of the mapping config.
  - ryanbrunner 14y ago
    I think the key difference, at least among most developers I work with, is that ORM has evolved from a complete abstraction of all relational querying, into more of a productivity tool that can be useful in certain circumstances. The differences between something like Hibernate and something like ActiveRecord is pretty vast, at least in terms of usage, and I think one of the key learnings we've made since 2004 is that it's not practical or feasible to treat ORM as a silver bullet. Honestly, no one should be surprised that ORM isn't a silver bullet. NoSQL isn't either - there's plenty of caveats that should be considered before deciding on using NoSQL. I'd still argue that about 80% of database interactions can be solved by a decent ORM. Anything that lets me ignore 80% of my trivial problems and focus on the 20% that's actually challenging is a net win in my book.
mseebach 14y ago
3: He explicitly mentions message passing and multi-process as opposed to multi-threaded, and that's dead on right. F#, Clojure, Scala, Erlang and Node are all approaches to concurrency that doesn't involve the developer dealing with threads.
- namdnay 14y ago
  And in the enterprise world, everything is managed in the Spring/JMS parts, which handle all the multithreaded stuff for you.
- banachtarski 14y ago
  +1. I thought that prediction was the most impressive one on the list.
  - emn13 14y ago
    me too :-).
dspillett 14y ago
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. A lot of things server-side are moving back towards multiple processes rather than threading, driven by "cloud" based scaling: if you code is designed to handle being spread over many nodes then why complicate things by having two concurrency models on the go at once (threads at host level, multiple processes spread over the hosts)? 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. While most individuals just use the free service level, you can pay for the use and support of Google Docs and some groups do. Same with Google Drive: while many won't need more than the free 5Gb it costs per month for more than that (if you are using it to store music and video 5Gb isn't hard to fill). 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. It makes perfect sense in a pointless way: most of everyone are average at everything. As people get better/worse the average shuffles around too. If he is talking about following best (or at least good) practises I can tell you thre are a lot of average people out there despite the tools avaliable to make it easier to do things right.
- zanny 14y ago
  > (threads at host level, multiple processes spread over the hosts) Concurrent programming isn't all "jump off a cliff into the atomic<T> and mutex lock sea and worry about deadlock or run everything in serial". There is a middle ground where you take apart the easily discretized parts of your task at hand, that have little or no communication between them, and thread those. For example, if you have a system to scrape a user profile, processing the personal information, hobbies, and pictures in separate threads only requires sending work to threads in a thread pool saying scrape X. That X gets scraped, database calls are asynchronous and work up to the thousands of workers, and you don't even need to wait - pass off the profile, let the threads run and wait for a new connection. Threaded parallelism only becomes dangerous when you start using shared data. That is where you need to ask if its worth the cost. You shouldn't be afraid of threading entirely just because you can back yourself into deadlock hell if you don't plan ahead.
megablast 14y ago
> 9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. If you count laptop+tablet sales, it may be close.
- sedev 14y ago
  If you count laptop plus tablet sales and measure by profit share, it's not remotely close: Apple obliterates its competitors by that measure.
kostya-kow 14y ago
>5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. I don't think it did. Lisp itself didn't become popular, but a lot of functional ideas are being implemented in more mainstream programming languages, and some functional languages are also becoming popular.
- pimeys 14y ago
  I don't think Lisp is a functional language like Haskell is. It's more of a language with no paradigm. You can do objects, you can do pure functions, you can write your own language easily. And the mainstream languages, like Java, C#, Ruby, Python have also been mixing up different paradigms. You have some kind of lambdas, maybe even closures. They rely heavily on objects and having mutability everywhere is still too common.
dudurocha 14y ago
In #2 isn't he describing wordpress.com? You see, wordpress is a open source plataform, but people pay money to have their blogs on it.
- jodrellblank 14y ago
  But he said "a lot of money". Maybe http://wpengine.com/ http://wpengine.com/ instead?
dsrguru 14y ago
> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. Not according to http://visual.ly/most-popular-programming-languages-2013 http://visual.ly/most-popular-programming-languages-2013. Clojure alone is in 10th place for code submitted to codeeval.com in 2013. Edit: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... appears less focused on web development and startups (it puts VB ahead of Ruby and leaves Clojure and Scala out completely) and even this ranking puts Lisp (presumably CL) at #13 overall.
baak 14y ago
JSON Databases have passed relational in popularity? I don't know that I believe that. Anyone know if there's a NoSQL/SQL market share comparison out there?
- johnward 14y ago
  They are becoming popular but there is no way they surpass relational databases in use.
  - randomdata 14y ago
    That brings up an interesting question of where the line of what is a database gets drawn. Does a JSON interface to a CRUD application that uses a relational database behind the scenes count as a JSON database? A part of me thinks it should. CouchDB positioned itself with a JSON API that allowed you to skip the CRUD middleware, so from the API consuming point of view there is essentially no difference.
    - raylu 14y ago
      http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/02/14/whats-nosql/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/02/14/whats-nosql/
- mattmanser 14y ago
  I honestly can't believe this comment is all the way down here. What a bubble we live in sometimes. I'd be surprised if it was much above 1%.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jimbokun 14y ago
"7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Happened sooner." It happened June 29, 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
jimbokun 14y ago
"9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God." iPad.
jimbokun 14y ago
"5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard." Tiobe has "Lisp" ranked 13, not clear what they included as "Lisp". (Specific Lisps like Scheme, Common Lisp, and Clojure rank much lower, so must be some kind of aggregate.) http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... Interestingly, the "Very Long Term History" table has Lisp going from rank 20 in 2008 to 13 in 2012. So Yegge clearly missed his top 10 prediction, but may have been on to something in regard to Lisp increasing in popularity (depending on how much credence you give Tiobe rankings, of course).
- lkrubner 14y ago
  You are perhaps aware that the Death Of Lisp happened in between the first date and the current date? The Golden Age Of Lisp was during the 1970s and 1980s when the USA Defense Department put substantial funds into AI research, and the favored language for AI research was Lisp. And, to a degree, the Lisp community became dependent on that money. If you look up some of the famous companies that put together Lisp-oriented machines circa 1980, there was the clear assumption that money from the Defense Department would continue forever. However, Communism collapsed in 1989 and from the Reagan build-up of the 1980s to the demobilization under Clinton in the 1990s, the USA spending on the military shifted from almost 9% of GDP to roughly 4% of GDP. There were cutbacks in research spending. And this lead to the Great Death Of Lisp. However, good ideas are resilient even if the face of death. People such as Paul Graham kept the flame alive. People like Rich Hickey brought it into the modern age. There is no question that Lisp is on the comeback trail. There is also, of course, the broader victory of Lisp: the impact it has had on all other languages. Paul Graham wrote about that here: http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html
ctdonath 14y ago
1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. Yup, close enough insofar as the point was made but some of the names were changed and improvements applied. 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. Ya know, he might be onto something there. In retrospect, it relies on fulfillment of #7. 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. It's just too obvious a technique to not use. Alternatives may be cleaner, but not as clear. "Get it done" trumps "make all the pieces play in perfect harmony". 4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. That assumed robust use of JVM. iOS & Android exploded onto the market, changing the landscape he was addressing. 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Nope. But I assume he never expected Objective-C would be. 6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. Facebook. EVERYBODY is on Facebook. Wasn't so important that "you and I" use it, but that our mothers would. 7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Odd that he was more predicting something not happening; we'll say he was right insofar as what constitutes "happened" is squishy and took a few years to get going, but wrong insofar as when it did happen it did so to a far greater degree than he expected. Half of the then-absurd snide "promises" he listed as others making have pretty much come true: HDTV pixel counts on a pocket device, LTE data rate 10x faster than T1, etc. 8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. He couldn't grok what Google would be able to offer for free. 9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. Had to invent the smartphone and tablet markets to do so, but insofar as an iPhone 5 is on par with notebooks back then, we'll count this as a big win. 10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. More a tautology than anything. What's "average" is pretty friggin' capable given a cheap modern toolset. For $99 and a Mac darned near any competent idiot can whip up a practical app and have it available to the world in a few days, no need for mad skillz. The thing about predictions is the difficulty of articulating how discoveries along the way will affect manifestation of the prediction. One may be right in the spirit of the prediction, but not the letter thereof.
- slashclee 14y ago
  > Half of the then-absurd snide "promises" he listed as others making have pretty much come true: HDTV pixel counts on a pocket device, LTE data rate 10x faster than T1, etc. Shame we still don't have microsecond latencies, though.
ajross 14y ago
Actually 4 is almost entirely backwards. He's saying that Java the language will be less popular than other JVM languages. That's not true at all. Obviously what actually happened is that the Sun/Oracle JVM dropped below 50% market share of "VMs that run Java", losing badly to Google's Dalvik. Java-the-language remains dominant on both, however.
mstachowiak 14y ago
Just for edification - regarding #2, GitHub is insanely profitable.
Taylorious 14y ago
@your answer to number 4 How do you see the market share dropping? There is this little thing called Android...
callmeed 14y ago
>> 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. My initial thoughts on #2 were AWS and the PAAS companies (Heroku, EngineYard, etc.) but maybe they're to broad to fit. The people who mention WordPress have a good point.
huxley 14y ago
9. I agree it's a miss but since then: * Gateway was bought at a firesale price by Acer * IBM sold off their PC business to Lenovo * both Dell and HP have been in the doldrums in terms of PC/laptop sales and they both desperately have tried to milk the enterprise software and services business Apple's total revenues come to about 69% of the combined revenue of HP, Dell, Acer and Lenovo ... so a miss since the iPhone/iPad have been what boosted Apple rather "laptops" per se (and certainly not to complete equality in revenues by 2010), but it's an interesting miss.
PakG1 14y ago
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. It must be. Github raised 100m from investors led by Andreesen Horowitz in 2012. You don't get that kind of funding from that level of quality investors without a seriously good financial trajectory.
- jliptzin 14y ago
  Therefore, Andreesen Horowitz prefers not to make risky investments.
T-hawk 14y ago
> 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. What that prediction missed was that Moore's Law finally broke down for single-threaded performance. Single cores got only about 3x faster from 2004 to today, rather than continuing the historical trend with four more doublings. Moore's Law is alive and well but now requires parallel architecture to exploit. But you can't blame an armchair pundit for missing this one. The 3 GHz clock speed barrier was hardly something a layman could have predicted; it's an artifact of extremely sophisticated manufacturing processes and infinitesimally detailed subatomic physics. A layman couldn't have said whether the physical limits of clock speed would be reached at 1 GHz or 100 GHz and in 2005 or 2025. > 6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. This succeeded way more than anyone thought. More than "you and I", our moms and grandparents even hang out there. It is Facebook.
- jodrellblank 14y ago
  Here's a 6.6Ghz overclock: http://www.custompcreview.com/news/intel-core-i7-3770k-overclocked-6-ghz/7409/ http://www.custompcreview.com/news/intel-core-i7-3770k-overc... with liquid Nitrogen cooling. So how much is it a room-temperature a physical limit, and how much an economic limit?
  - dspeyer 14y ago
    We're not that far from the speed of light barrier. There's a fixed amount of time it takes for any information to get from one end of a chip to the other and back. Only shrinking the die will decrease that.
martinced 14y ago
9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. Well he wasn't that far. The high-end laptop market is utterly dominated by Apple: already in 2007 they had more than 30% (growing by 8% from 2006) of the high-end laptop market and now they're at more than 50%. So their sales there exceed those of all the other players combined. They're also the uncontested winner in the ultra-thin laptops market. Granted, there's a market for IBM Thinkpads but you simply cannot say he was far off regarding is Apple laptops prediction.
- dgudkov 14y ago
  Premium products almost never dominate in global markets.
AdamFernandez 14y ago
I believe number 6 accurately describes Facebook, which in November of 2004 may not have been on his radar as fulfilling this role.
buzzkills 14y ago
I'm sorry he got (1.) wrong. Let's be really generous and say that he means databases that aren't relational (which is totally different from XML database), even by that definition I'd argue that there aren't more people (developers) using Non relational over relational. How about end users, yes probably more users, but even in 2004 more people were using non-relation databases than relational (file systems, LDAP, Lotus Domino, VSAM, IMS, AD). So perhaps you could interpret surpass to mean 'better than', well that's just vague.
dspeyer 14y ago
> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though. NoSQL still stores tables, not trees (or at least the NoSQLs I've paid attention to do). That's the change he was predicting. You still need a tabular schema for your NoSQL database.
- emn13 14y ago
  Hmmm - not really. You're storing complex object(or document or xml or json). In other words, you're not using the db schema to destructure your model, but just using it to get at the bits you want. It's close enough in essence.
suyash 14y ago
@friendly_chap: No surprise considering how shit Java is. You must be a shitty developer for hating on Java. Didn't you read thru the article about how useful and awesome Java is. The worlds top websites, mobile apps heavily run on Java and JVM.
ville 14y ago
> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. It peaked[1] in 2010 and is now settled on the 13th place, so I got to give him some credit for this prediction. If you include other dialects including newcomers such as Clojure, we might be talking at least close to the 10th most popular. [1]: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Lisp.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Lisp.html
coldtea 14y ago
>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. Err, that prediction talks about something like Amazon AWS and Heroku, which very much happened. Not about hosting open source CODE. >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. Nope. Multi-threaded programming he talks about has long fallen out of favor. Multicore programming in 2013 is all about message passing, STM et al --where threads are hidden from the programmer. >5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. If you count Clojure, it didn't fail that bad. But the general trend towards functional programming and its concepts means that the prediction sort of have been proven true, despite Lisp not being the language that brought it. >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. Are you kidding me? This is all about Facebook, before there was facebook. >7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Happened sooner. Well, the iPhone appeared on 2007, so not that much sooner. And he is correct that the whole market exploded a little afterwards (the first iPhone wasn't even 3G, remember?). >9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. Actually not that off. Especially if you include the iPad: http://photos.appleinsider.com/deutsche-120206.jpg http://photos.appleinsider.com/deutsche-120206.jpg And even without it, Apple has 1) that exact share of profits (of all those others combined), 2) that share of the high-end (> $1000) market. >10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. This makes no sense Makes no sense? If anything it's an absolutely true tautological statement, mathematically speaking.

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
  Github is not an open source webapp. It's a closed source web app that hosts other people's open source apps (web and not).
  - Noxchi 14y ago
    Github hosts git repositories. Git is open source.
    - mseebach 14y ago
      Github does a metric f%ckton more than hosting git repositories.
- CodeCube 14y ago
  I think for #1, there are a number of hosting providers that match this description, such as Dreamhost, that offer a number of open source web apps that you can install with a single click. They manage them, upgrade them, back them up ... all you gotta do is pay them. That being said, GitHub does indeed match the description, though I think people are thinking about the code they are hosting for other people ... but I think where they fit the description is with the fact that they are hosting Git for you (and making some money through enterprise services).
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  >> 6. Oh come on, facebook, youporn, whatever. As I said, too vague. Yeah, so he didn't call out a specific "type" of socializing, or draw up the wireframe for facebook here. But he just recognized there is a huge trend of people wanting to share their lives and communicate in near real time. I think he nailed it. Facebook and twiiter are just that. Even look at his move example. These days, you watch you movie or TV show, then laugh and comment on it with your friends not in the theater, but on facebook or twitter. I'd say he NAILED that prediction.
  - doomlaser 14y ago
    Facebook already existed with over a million users when he wrote this.

nos4A2 14y ago

I think on point 2, he meant a hoster like heroku or AWS? On point 6, its reddit (BBS for this gen), point 8, google drive, android apps, play store etc, point 9, I think the iPad counts :) Overall quite spot on i'd say..

seanmcdirmid 14y ago

> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Thank god we dodged that bullet. I'm just glad people see XML for what it really is (useful, but not that useful). > Not really. We are already in the multicore age, and it will only get moreticore. The problem is multi-threaded has never really took off, even with all the cores we have today. There is still no silverbullet to harnessing parallelism. > Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. Apple's profits on laptop sales (not other iOS devices) exceed those of HP, Lenovo, and Dell (everyone else being dead). Apple has been in no hurry to capture the unit shipped crown (and if we count iPads, they are already there). > In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. A tautology if I ever heard one.

friendly_chap 14y ago
> useful, but not that useful + 1 > Apple's profits With all respect, I have hard time seeing Apple laptops outside the US. Not counting some fanboys who acquired the taste trough some snob blogs.
- MrScruff 14y ago
  With all respect, I have hard time seeing Apple laptops outside the US. Indeed. And where I am (also outside the US) I have a hard time seeing non-Apple laptops. Anecdotal evidence isn't really that useful when we're talking about global trends. Not counting some fanboys who acquired the taste trough some snob blogs. Making statements like this cause you come across as overly emotionally invested in your platform, and make others less likely to take your arguments seriously.
  - friendly_chap 14y ago
    > Emotional investemented No. I happen to use anything. I am not against Apple, I am against the Apple fanboyism. And any type of fanboyism. > Anecdotal evidence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system... "For example, most desktop and laptop computers use Microsoft Windows"

ghshephard 14y ago

"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." This is one he nailed - Facebook.

dools 14y ago
More like reddit, no? Or hacker news ;)
Wilya 14y ago
You could repeat the same prediction every year, and you'd probably be right everytime.
- rmc 14y ago
  Nah, mainstream social networks are new.
  - unalone 14y ago
    Yeah, if you're living a decade ago. By 2005, MySpace was such a big deal that if you were a student without one, you'd feel like you were missing out on something important socially, and by 2008, Facebook had pretty much everybody, including grandparents, as a user. Nowadays the center is shifting again, and most of the people I know have started using Tumblr as their social locus, but it probably won't overtake FB. I'd predict something new coming up in the next year or two that ends up overtaking Facebook in market share, but its approach will have to be highly insightful and unusual, nothing like what I've seen yet online. (Path comes the closest, but Path's reliance on smartphones kills their audience; I still have friends without smartphones and I'd never use a platform that shuts out friends for their consumer decisions.)
    - KaoruAoiShiho 14y ago
      Read the title, this is from 2004, which makes it incredibly prescient. Even Zuckerberg didn't realize what a big deal FB was in 2004.

Nursie 14y ago

The XML things is quite amusing, given how far out of favour XML went. XML has now failed hard AFAICT. But I can agree the spirit of the prediction lives on in the form NoSQL and JSON.

jiggy2011 14y ago
Has it failed? Or have people just stopped trying to shoehorn it everywhere? There are cases where XML is a great format. For example in the past I wrote a system for interfacing with a government department. The thing was an epic of about 30 different schemas, however being able to actually look at a concrete schema for specification and actually be able to test against it was invaluable. Trying to build that thing with JSON would have driven me to tears.
- Nursie 14y ago
  Well, perhaps it's not fair to say XML itself has failed, but the idea of XML as the data format to end all data formats seems to have fallen flat on its arse. I too like the ability to validate XML against a schema and found it invaluable when dealing with a set of (needlessly) complex ant-plugins a couple of years back.
Ingaz 14y ago
XML is not about "<" and ">" everywhere. XML, JSON, MUMPS are semantically equivalent.
- jonpeda 14y ago
  XML is far more structured than JSON.
  - Ingaz 14y ago
    Yes. But in fact: you add javascript - you have all strictness and structure of XML.

dools 14y ago

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. I think he means more like wordpress.com, WPEngine and those ilk. Those are currently the most lucrative, but there are other examples of businesses monetising open source by hosting it.

friendly_chap 14y ago
That's right, much clearer now. And yes, there is indeed shitload of money in that market.
johndavidback 14y ago
I think more specifically he means things like Heroku or Modulus.
- leoedin 14y ago
  I'm not sure if that's what he means. The discussion of the point specifically mentions applications like bug trackers and wikis - not software that tends to be developed in house. Heroku is generally used for hosting applications that you wrote, rather than for hosting open source stacks developed by others (e.g. phpBB or MediaWiki). Saying that, it all falls under the general trend of providing system administration as a service. Given how much ongoing effort is required to maintain secure, up to date and efficient servers, this is probably a good thing.
  - johndavidback 14y ago
    That's very true, good point. I that this was a case of being mostly right and not realizing just how right he is in certain respects: > most small development shops would pay a monthly fee not to have to administer the apps themselves. and > But would an external dev team trust some big company like Amazon with with their intellectual property? and > So I predict that someone will come along and offer an innovation hosting service, and make a lot of money off it. OP had his finger on the pulse of tech, though, that much is certain.

f1codz 14y ago

> Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. On contrary, for me this one was one of the strongest predictions. In my opinion, predictions should be taken in spirit and not by letter. Looking at the rise of Clojure, i dare say that was a great foresight.

jonaldomo 14y ago

_that_ profitable??? The company I work for pays $250 a year for Github Enterprise per developer for about 400 developers... That is just one company. 100k/year! They are thinking about extending it to all 2,000 developers. A few months ago they raised $100 million!

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
- bazzargh 14y ago
  Source? According to Scott Chacon himself, it was profitable even back in 2010. http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/github-one-million/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/24/github-one-million/ Or this: http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/news/github-gets-100-million-investment http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/news/github-gets-100-million-inve... Announcing the investment on the GitHub blog, CEO Tom Preston-Warner admitted it wasn’t that they necessarily needed it: “Our company has been profitable for years, is growing fast, and doesn’t need money. So why bother? Because we want to be better. We want to build the best products.”
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Ah, sorry. I thought they were still in start-up mode. It does seem a bit early for them to be turning a profit; I hope they are investing enough.
    - nullymcnull 14y ago
      So, you were assuming that they weren't making a profit based on some sort of gut feeling that they were "still in start-up mode", but you used quite absolute language suggesting personal knowledge of the state of their books.
      - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
        Why the heck would GitHub take $100 million in investment and still push for earning a profit every quarter? Does it make any sense to you? Now you can see why I'm confused.

derefr 14y ago

> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. I don't know about hard. I can now imagine a day where Clojure is the predominant JVM language--whereas if you told me five years ago a Lisp would be even as popular as Clojure is now, I would have scoffed. Now, the by 2010 part is wrong, indeed. But I see these predictions as being more about acceleration than current velocity.

PommeDeTerre 14y ago
I think you're overestimating the popularity of Clojure. While it's not as totally obscure as many other Lisp, Scheme or Lisp-like language implementations, it's not very widely used at all. Its penetration is minimal, even compared to Scala (which has seen much more significant usage, but still pales in comparison to Java). While Clojure is a step in a better direction, I don't think it's gaining traction all that quickly. There's a whole lot of existing Java and Scala code that would need to be completely discarded or ignored in order for Clojure's usage to be considered as having any impact.

RyanMcGreal 14y ago

> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though. JSON is basically XML with 50% less bullshit. It does less but it does it so much more elegantly than XML - and has the further benefit of a syntax similar to that of structured data in such languages as Javascript (duh), Python and Ruby - that it was a shoo-in to squeeze XML out of most non-enterprise uses, at least on the data transfer format side. However, to this day most data still resides in SQL databases, which have the net advantages of speed, stability and reliability that come from long lead time. What has changed is that object-relational mapping has gotten vastly better than it was in 2004, so programmers can mostly enjoy the best of both worlds. There's also the fact that SQL is an easy enough DSL to understand, read and write that it isn't a barrier to use even in edge cases where ORMs fall down.

SonicSoul 14y ago
> object-relational mapping has gotten vastly better than it was in 2004 Maybe so, but it still seems like it's only good for prototyping. With each new version of ORM i get excited and try to implement it, but sooner or later it comes to bite me in the ass, and long term maintenance becomes more painful than not using ORM with all the low level hacks that need to be added and tricky management of the mapping config.
- ryanbrunner 14y ago
  I think the key difference, at least among most developers I work with, is that ORM has evolved from a complete abstraction of all relational querying, into more of a productivity tool that can be useful in certain circumstances. The differences between something like Hibernate and something like ActiveRecord is pretty vast, at least in terms of usage, and I think one of the key learnings we've made since 2004 is that it's not practical or feasible to treat ORM as a silver bullet. Honestly, no one should be surprised that ORM isn't a silver bullet. NoSQL isn't either - there's plenty of caveats that should be considered before deciding on using NoSQL. I'd still argue that about 80% of database interactions can be solved by a decent ORM. Anything that lets me ignore 80% of my trivial problems and focus on the 20% that's actually challenging is a net win in my book.

mseebach 14y ago

3: He explicitly mentions message passing and multi-process as opposed to multi-threaded, and that's dead on right. F#, Clojure, Scala, Erlang and Node are all approaches to concurrency that doesn't involve the developer dealing with threads.

namdnay 14y ago
And in the enterprise world, everything is managed in the Spring/JMS parts, which handle all the multithreaded stuff for you.
banachtarski 14y ago
+1. I thought that prediction was the most impressive one on the list.
- emn13 14y ago
  me too :-).

dspillett 14y ago

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. A lot of things server-side are moving back towards multiple processes rather than threading, driven by "cloud" based scaling: if you code is designed to handle being spread over many nodes then why complicate things by having two concurrency models on the go at once (threads at host level, multiple processes spread over the hosts)? 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. While most individuals just use the free service level, you can pay for the use and support of Google Docs and some groups do. Same with Google Drive: while many won't need more than the free 5Gb it costs per month for more than that (if you are using it to store music and video 5Gb isn't hard to fill). 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. It makes perfect sense in a pointless way: most of everyone are average at everything. As people get better/worse the average shuffles around too. If he is talking about following best (or at least good) practises I can tell you thre are a lot of average people out there despite the tools avaliable to make it easier to do things right.

zanny 14y ago
> (threads at host level, multiple processes spread over the hosts) Concurrent programming isn't all "jump off a cliff into the atomic<T> and mutex lock sea and worry about deadlock or run everything in serial". There is a middle ground where you take apart the easily discretized parts of your task at hand, that have little or no communication between them, and thread those. For example, if you have a system to scrape a user profile, processing the personal information, hobbies, and pictures in separate threads only requires sending work to threads in a thread pool saying scrape X. That X gets scraped, database calls are asynchronous and work up to the thousands of workers, and you don't even need to wait - pass off the profile, let the threads run and wait for a new connection. Threaded parallelism only becomes dangerous when you start using shared data. That is where you need to ask if its worth the cost. You shouldn't be afraid of threading entirely just because you can back yourself into deadlock hell if you don't plan ahead.

megablast 14y ago

> 9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. If you count laptop+tablet sales, it may be close.

sedev 14y ago
If you count laptop plus tablet sales and measure by profit share, it's not remotely close: Apple obliterates its competitors by that measure.

kostya-kow 14y ago

>5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. I don't think it did. Lisp itself didn't become popular, but a lot of functional ideas are being implemented in more mainstream programming languages, and some functional languages are also becoming popular.

pimeys 14y ago
I don't think Lisp is a functional language like Haskell is. It's more of a language with no paradigm. You can do objects, you can do pure functions, you can write your own language easily. And the mainstream languages, like Java, C#, Ruby, Python have also been mixing up different paradigms. You have some kind of lambdas, maybe even closures. They rely heavily on objects and having mutability everywhere is still too common.

dudurocha 14y ago

In #2 isn't he describing wordpress.com? You see, wordpress is a open source plataform, but people pay money to have their blogs on it.

jodrellblank 14y ago
But he said "a lot of money". Maybe http://wpengine.com/ http://wpengine.com/ instead?

dsrguru 14y ago

> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. Not according to http://visual.ly/most-popular-programming-languages-2013 http://visual.ly/most-popular-programming-languages-2013. Clojure alone is in 10th place for code submitted to codeeval.com in 2013. Edit: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... appears less focused on web development and startups (it puts VB ahead of Ruby and leaves Clojure and Scala out completely) and even this ranking puts Lisp (presumably CL) at #13 overall.

baak 14y ago

JSON Databases have passed relational in popularity? I don't know that I believe that. Anyone know if there's a NoSQL/SQL market share comparison out there?

johnward 14y ago
They are becoming popular but there is no way they surpass relational databases in use.
- randomdata 14y ago
  That brings up an interesting question of where the line of what is a database gets drawn. Does a JSON interface to a CRUD application that uses a relational database behind the scenes count as a JSON database? A part of me thinks it should. CouchDB positioned itself with a JSON API that allowed you to skip the CRUD middleware, so from the API consuming point of view there is essentially no difference.
  - raylu 14y ago
    http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/02/14/whats-nosql/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/02/14/whats-nosql/
mattmanser 14y ago
I honestly can't believe this comment is all the way down here. What a bubble we live in sometimes. I'd be surprised if it was much above 1%.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

jimbokun 14y ago

"7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Happened sooner." It happened June 29, 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

jimbokun 14y ago

"9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God." iPad.

jimbokun 14y ago

"5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard." Tiobe has "Lisp" ranked 13, not clear what they included as "Lisp". (Specific Lisps like Scheme, Common Lisp, and Clojure rank much lower, so must be some kind of aggregate.) http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... Interestingly, the "Very Long Term History" table has Lisp going from rank 20 in 2008 to 13 in 2012. So Yegge clearly missed his top 10 prediction, but may have been on to something in regard to Lisp increasing in popularity (depending on how much credence you give Tiobe rankings, of course).

lkrubner 14y ago
You are perhaps aware that the Death Of Lisp happened in between the first date and the current date? The Golden Age Of Lisp was during the 1970s and 1980s when the USA Defense Department put substantial funds into AI research, and the favored language for AI research was Lisp. And, to a degree, the Lisp community became dependent on that money. If you look up some of the famous companies that put together Lisp-oriented machines circa 1980, there was the clear assumption that money from the Defense Department would continue forever. However, Communism collapsed in 1989 and from the Reagan build-up of the 1980s to the demobilization under Clinton in the 1990s, the USA spending on the military shifted from almost 9% of GDP to roughly 4% of GDP. There were cutbacks in research spending. And this lead to the Great Death Of Lisp. However, good ideas are resilient even if the face of death. People such as Paul Graham kept the flame alive. People like Rich Hickey brought it into the modern age. There is no question that Lisp is on the comeback trail. There is also, of course, the broader victory of Lisp: the impact it has had on all other languages. Paul Graham wrote about that here: http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html http://www.paulgraham.com/diff.html

ctdonath 14y ago

1. XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity by 2011. Yup, close enough insofar as the point was made but some of the names were changed and improvements applied. 2. Someone will make a lot of money by hosting open-source web applications. Ya know, he might be onto something there. In retrospect, it relies on fulfillment of #7. 3. Multi-threaded programming will fall out of favor by 2012. It's just too obvious a technique to not use. Alternatives may be cleaner, but not as clear. "Get it done" trumps "make all the pieces play in perfect harmony". 4. Java's "market share" on the JVM will drop below 50% by 2010. That assumed robust use of JVM. iOS & Android exploded onto the market, changing the landscape he was addressing. 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. Nope. But I assume he never expected Objective-C would be. 6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. Facebook. EVERYBODY is on Facebook. Wasn't so important that "you and I" use it, but that our mothers would. 7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Odd that he was more predicting something not happening; we'll say he was right insofar as what constitutes "happened" is squishy and took a few years to get going, but wrong insofar as when it did happen it did so to a far greater degree than he expected. Half of the then-absurd snide "promises" he listed as others making have pretty much come true: HDTV pixel counts on a pocket device, LTE data rate 10x faster than T1, etc. 8. Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their services. He couldn't grok what Google would be able to offer for free. 9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. Had to invent the smartphone and tablet markets to do so, but insofar as an iPhone 5 is on par with notebooks back then, we'll count this as a big win. 10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. More a tautology than anything. What's "average" is pretty friggin' capable given a cheap modern toolset. For $99 and a Mac darned near any competent idiot can whip up a practical app and have it available to the world in a few days, no need for mad skillz. The thing about predictions is the difficulty of articulating how discoveries along the way will affect manifestation of the prediction. One may be right in the spirit of the prediction, but not the letter thereof.

slashclee 14y ago
> Half of the then-absurd snide "promises" he listed as others making have pretty much come true: HDTV pixel counts on a pocket device, LTE data rate 10x faster than T1, etc. Shame we still don't have microsecond latencies, though.

ajross 14y ago

Actually 4 is almost entirely backwards. He's saying that Java the language will be less popular than other JVM languages. That's not true at all. Obviously what actually happened is that the Sun/Oracle JVM dropped below 50% market share of "VMs that run Java", losing badly to Google's Dalvik. Java-the-language remains dominant on both, however.

mstachowiak 14y ago

Just for edification - regarding #2, GitHub is insanely profitable.

Taylorious 14y ago

@your answer to number 4 How do you see the market share dropping? There is this little thing called Android...

callmeed 14y ago

>> 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. My initial thoughts on #2 were AWS and the PAAS companies (Heroku, EngineYard, etc.) but maybe they're to broad to fit. The people who mention WordPress have a good point.

huxley 14y ago

9. I agree it's a miss but since then: * Gateway was bought at a firesale price by Acer * IBM sold off their PC business to Lenovo * both Dell and HP have been in the doldrums in terms of PC/laptop sales and they both desperately have tried to milk the enterprise software and services business Apple's total revenues come to about 69% of the combined revenue of HP, Dell, Acer and Lenovo ... so a miss since the iPhone/iPad have been what boosted Apple rather "laptops" per se (and certainly not to complete equality in revenues by 2010), but it's an interesting miss.

PakG1 14y ago

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. It must be. Github raised 100m from investors led by Andreesen Horowitz in 2012. You don't get that kind of funding from that level of quality investors without a seriously good financial trajectory.

jliptzin 14y ago
Therefore, Andreesen Horowitz prefers not to make risky investments.

T-hawk 14y ago

> 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. What that prediction missed was that Moore's Law finally broke down for single-threaded performance. Single cores got only about 3x faster from 2004 to today, rather than continuing the historical trend with four more doublings. Moore's Law is alive and well but now requires parallel architecture to exploit. But you can't blame an armchair pundit for missing this one. The 3 GHz clock speed barrier was hardly something a layman could have predicted; it's an artifact of extremely sophisticated manufacturing processes and infinitesimally detailed subatomic physics. A layman couldn't have said whether the physical limits of clock speed would be reached at 1 GHz or 100 GHz and in 2005 or 2025. > 6. A new internet community-hangout will appear. One that you and I will frequent. This succeeded way more than anyone thought. More than "you and I", our moms and grandparents even hang out there. It is Facebook.

jodrellblank 14y ago
Here's a 6.6Ghz overclock: http://www.custompcreview.com/news/intel-core-i7-3770k-overclocked-6-ghz/7409/ http://www.custompcreview.com/news/intel-core-i7-3770k-overc... with liquid Nitrogen cooling. So how much is it a room-temperature a physical limit, and how much an economic limit?
- dspeyer 14y ago
  We're not that far from the speed of light barrier. There's a fixed amount of time it takes for any information to get from one end of a chip to the other and back. Only shrinking the die will decrease that.

martinced 14y ago

9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. Well he wasn't that far. The high-end laptop market is utterly dominated by Apple: already in 2007 they had more than 30% (growing by 8% from 2006) of the high-end laptop market and now they're at more than 50%. So their sales there exceed those of all the other players combined. They're also the uncontested winner in the ultra-thin laptops market. Granted, there's a market for IBM Thinkpads but you simply cannot say he was far off regarding is Apple laptops prediction.

dgudkov 14y ago
Premium products almost never dominate in global markets.

AdamFernandez 14y ago

I believe number 6 accurately describes Facebook, which in November of 2004 may not have been on his radar as fulfilling this role.

buzzkills 14y ago

I'm sorry he got (1.) wrong. Let's be really generous and say that he means databases that aren't relational (which is totally different from XML database), even by that definition I'd argue that there aren't more people (developers) using Non relational over relational. How about end users, yes probably more users, but even in 2004 more people were using non-relation databases than relational (file systems, LDAP, Lotus Domino, VSAM, IMS, AD). So perhaps you could interpret surpass to mean 'better than', well that's just vague.

dspeyer 14y ago

> We got NoSQL (esp. JSON based ones) instead of XML. Close enough though. NoSQL still stores tables, not trees (or at least the NoSQLs I've paid attention to do). That's the change he was predicting. You still need a tabular schema for your NoSQL database.

emn13 14y ago
Hmmm - not really. You're storing complex object(or document or xml or json). In other words, you're not using the db schema to destructure your model, but just using it to get at the bits you want. It's close enough in essence.

suyash 14y ago

@friendly_chap: No surprise considering how shit Java is. You must be a shitty developer for hating on Java. Didn't you read thru the article about how useful and awesome Java is. The worlds top websites, mobile apps heavily run on Java and JVM.

ville 14y ago

> 5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. It peaked[1] in 2010 and is now settled on the 13th place, so I got to give him some credit for this prediction. If you include other dialects including newcomers such as Clojure, we might be talking at least close to the 10th most popular. [1]: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Lisp.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/paperinfo/tpci/Lisp.html

coldtea 14y ago

>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. Err, that prediction talks about something like Amazon AWS and Heroku, which very much happened. Not about hosting open source CODE. >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. Nope. Multi-threaded programming he talks about has long fallen out of favor. Multicore programming in 2013 is all about message passing, STM et al --where threads are hidden from the programmer. >5. Lisp will be in the top 10 most popular programming languages by 2010. This failed hard. If you count Clojure, it didn't fail that bad. But the general trend towards functional programming and its concepts means that the prediction sort of have been proven true, despite Lisp not being the language that brought it. >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. Are you kidding me? This is all about Facebook, before there was facebook. >7. The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out. Happened sooner. Well, the iPhone appeared on 2007, so not that much sooner. And he is correct that the whole market exploded a little afterwards (the first iPhone wasn't even 3G, remember?). >9. Apple's laptop sales will exceed those of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010. No way, thanks God. Actually not that off. Especially if you include the iPad: http://photos.appleinsider.com/deutsche-120206.jpg http://photos.appleinsider.com/deutsche-120206.jpg And even without it, Apple has 1) that exact share of profits (of all those others combined), 2) that share of the high-end (> $1000) market. >10. In five years' time, most programmers will still be average. This makes no sense Makes no sense? If anything it's an absolutely true tautological statement, mathematically speaking.