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Re:The Risk of Discovery by nostrademons on Thursday January 12, 2017 @04:34PM (#13386321)
Makes you wonder what the "software industry" will look like in 300 years.

Good ideas tend to split & bifurcate, until the original term is considered simply common sense and the parts people care about are individual subfields that were trivial when they started. Recall that "industry" used to refer to anything that was mass-produced in a factory, which, back in the 1820s, basically meant textiles. As the general techniques proved their worth, "industry" split into subfields, such that we got the "oil industry" and "steel industry" and "auto industry" and "aviation industry" and so on.

I think a similar process is happening with software, where the "software industry" is bifurcating into embedded software, social software, payment software, etc, much of it in support of an existing industry; "software is eating the world". I suspect that we're in the very early phases of this. In the early history of the industrial revolution, most industries were ways to produce existing goods (clothing, iron, tobacco, energy) dramatically more efficiently, much like how much software today is embedded in old-line industries' line-of-business apps. But starting around 1900, you started getting industries (electricity, aviation, pharmaceuticals) that were largely unrecognizable compared to their substitutes. You're seeing the very beginning of that now with specifically Internet- and cloud-based industries, but it likely has another century to go.

Re:The Risk of Discovery by photojosh on Thursday January 12, 2017 @05:55PM (#13386925)
Good point. I do both embedded (well) and web (so-so) dev, and they are worlds apart in almost every aspect I can think of.
Re:The Risk of Discovery by jacobush on Friday January 13, 2017 @05:09AM (#13389733)
The comment above yours made me think. If the outline holds, they are about to become even more worlds apart. It's funny to think that our grand children may marvel at how workers of today could move between fields with relative ease which then will be deemed worlds apart. We may all look a bit like renaissance men to them.
Re:The Risk of Discovery by temp246810 on Thursday January 12, 2017 @07:11PM (#13387361)
Thanks for your comment.

This is the kind of thoughtful comment I come here for - it's given me some ideas to go research on my own.