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Ask HN: What are the new ideas of the last 10 (or 5) years?
Let's look at the following statements:
"Personal computers will be a big hit."
"Internet search will be an extremely important and profitable business."
These statements were absolutely not trivially true at the time when personal computers started, or when Google started.
Can we collect important statements, which were not trivial 10 years ago, but seems to be fairly trivial now? (Regarding topics in which HN can be interested: mostly innovations.)
A more interesting, but harder question: what happens if we take 5 years instead of 10? (Can we see clearly enough in this case? In what time-granularities can we think? What is the pace of development?)
- stefano 17y agoDifferent languages hosted on the same VM. Ten years ago if you said JVM the only language to come to mind was Java. Now it's common to think of Clojure, Scala, JRuby, Rhino, etc. too.
- SwellJoe 17y agoAnd JavaScript will be the most popular language, by far, for most types of applications.
- eru 17y agoExcel is a close contender. It's still the world's most popular programming language. It incorporates a zeroth order functional language (the spreadsheet).
- SwellJoe 17y agoWe're talking about the future, not the past. Excel, while astonishingly popular today, has nowhere to go but down.
- eru 17y agoIt's a long way down.
- IsaacL 17y agoOff-topic, but what's a zeroth order functional language? What are the other orders (something reqiring lambdas, closures, etc)? Google and Wikipedia didn't help.
- eru 17y agoThis is a quote from a talk at the International Conference on Function Programming (or more specifically the Workshop for Commercial Users of Functional Programming http://cufp.galois.com/2009/abstracts.html http://cufp.galois.com/2009/abstracts.html). But Lee Benfield who said it, attributed the saying to Simon Peyton-Jones. A higher-order functional language allows higher order functions like map, filter and foldl (functions on functions). A first order language allows to define functions, but not on other functions. And a zeroth order language does not allow you to define functions (or name anything) as far as I figure.
- tgdavies 17y agoOr will Javascript just be the machine language of the internet, with software written in more expressive languages such as Java via GWT?
- eru 17y agoInteresting thought. (Though I doubt that Java is more expressive than Javascript. I'd replace Java with something like F#, clojure, Arc, Haskell or so.)
- halo 17y agoIt's not really a new idea, though. IBM developed NetRexx, a version of Rexx which compiles down to Java, in the mid-90s, for example. Kawa, a version of Scheme for the JVM, dates back to 1996 or so.
- stefano 17y agoI agree. It wasn't new, but back then it was an exception, something really different from the norm. Now it's a more common thing. Now it's taken for granted that different languages can target the same VM and interoparate without going down to C.
- patio11 17y agoMobile phones will be your primary communication device. Most software will eventually be accessed from a browser. People will pay $15 a month in perpetuity for a single video game. Talking to someone about your finances will be the exception, not the rule. All of your routine transactions are automated. So are many of the non-routine ones, such as opening a new account for anything smaller than a mortgage -- and we'll automate most of that, too. You'll laugh in the general direction of what people used to pay for money management, unless you're very rich or very poor. It used to take effort to find out where you were going. It now takes effort to not know where you are.
- SwellJoe 17y agoMobile phones will be your primary communication device. They already are for a lot of people. Go further. They will be your primary computing, gaming, banking, music, GPS/maps, device. There are so many opportunities in mobile that it's almost silly to be working on anything else (and yet, I am working on something else).
- dagw 17y agoTalking to someone about your finances will be the exception, not the rule. Isn't this already done? I haven't visited or talked to anyone at a bank (other than a couple of calls to the help desk for my online banking when strange things happen) for years. Paying bills, transferring money, applying for loans smaller than a mortgage, opening and closing accounts, managing my investments. All that is trivially done on-line these days. I don't know anybody who doesn't do all their personal financial management over the internet.
- halo 17y agoI'm not convinced this is a particularly useful exercise because most changes are the evolution of what came before. You're trying to create a neat package of discrete changes when the real world is continuous and evolutionary. Take "Internet search will be an extremely important and profitable business", for example. But Yahoo and AltaVista were both important and profitable before Google even existed, and their existence is because of the web's lack of built-in search, which was a design decision, for example. If you'd told me 15 years ago that the most popular and profitable website in the world was a search engine making money through delivering ads, I wouldn't have been particularly surprised.
- btn 17y agoWhat is the pace of development? Obviously not fast enough for the moon colonies and jet-packs I was promised.
- arethuza 17y agoTo nitpick, isn't it really that "Selling advertising on the top of search is an extremely important and profitable business"?
- tlrobinson 17y ago...for essentially a single company.
- csbartus 17y agoCode won't be written but generated
- ianbishop 17y agoI truly feel that 3D printers will change the way we live. Maybe not in the next 5-10 years though.
- rodrigo 17y agoHow? What could we be doing different if we have them? Not rethorical, please share your opinion.
- fnid 17y agorapidly innovating physical products. fixing our own physical devices. 3d printers are to the physical world what 3gl languages are to software, or maybe assembly, or maybe machine language over punch cards.
- BobCat 17y agoThe time you waste instructing the 3d printer to recreate your broken widget is better spent carving it out with the methods at hand. That little steel thingy that wore out I can drill, file and bend by hand faster than you can CAD/CAM it up. You'll beat me if you're making many of something. But your home shop 3d printer still won't print steel.
- ianbishop 17y agoYou raise a good point - but consider: * It is very possible that 3D printers may be able to craft some sort of metal in the future. * You will have massive CAD sharing websites if 3D Printers were to ever become a home standard. You would be able to simply grab and print anything you need - quickly. Your comment overlooks the fact that most people cannot drill, file or bend by hand. The unfortunate reality is that most of us are not machinists. Much like how most of us cannot compute large mathematical equations. For this, we created a tool to make it so everyone could do. The result has grown far from that simple goal.
- 17y ago
- c00p3r 17y agoOpen source web browsers will be next development platform. P2P networks will change the way of distribution of digital media. Linux-based systems will dominate server market. Linux become the supply of reusable software components for mobile devices. Mobile carriers will dominate internet-access market. OMG! I forgot facebook. Social networks as the second major place for a product placements (indirect advertisement) and brain-washing after TV.
- 10ren 17y agoI like 15 years, because that's 10 doublings by Moore's Law... 1024. What becomes trivial with an iPhone that's 1,000 times faster? If instead of Crysis fps of 20, you have 20,000. If instead of 2GB RAM, you had 2TB RAM; instead of 1TB HDD, 1PB. Instead of 2 MB/sec broadband, 2 GB/sec. That's just the standard, average device - not high end. Of course, these might be disrupted by something less powerful but more convenient. One trend is HDD being disrupted by SSD, and by the cloud. Flat-screens probably will be disrupted by 3D/hemispherical/projectors/e-ink screens.
- didip 17y ago"different mode of revenue for web software" Ads was and is obvious now, but there's a limit to how much ads budget the world have. A number of startups are now experimenting with various freemium or one time fee or granular pay-as-you-use. I'm expecting this trend to go up. And maybe there will be companies that make some of these payment plans automated.
- jamesbritt 17y agoUbiquitous recording. Capturing damn near everything on video, and storing it in some endless cloud. Not quite there yet, but headed that way.
- iterationx 17y agoI think you would enjoy the book "Megatrends" http://www.amazon.com/Megatrends-Ten-Directions-Transforming-Lives/dp/0446356816 http://www.amazon.com/Megatrends-Ten-Directions-Transforming...
- herval 17y agoaugmented reality on contact lenses (or anything as intimate as them) - no more clunky cellphones with screens: everything right there in front of your eyes (and the voices inside your head). Introducing the iYou. edit: that's my take for something for the NEXT 5-10 years - re-reading the question, it makes me wonder if it was about things that were created on the PAST 5-10 years... doh!
- herval 17y agoFunny to notice that the Internet is already "an extremely important business" - but it's still NOT profitable for the vast majority of people (quite the contrary, if you analyze how many businesses/industries are getting dismantled as technology spreads its wings and everything goes digital)...