The Programming Steamroller Waits For No One (2013)

Re:The Programming Steamroller Waits For No One (2013) by chubot on Sunday February 09, 2014 @02:08PM (#7206629)

It really amazes me that Unix has not only lasted so long, but actually increased in its relevance (being the foundation behind Android, iPhone, OS X, AWS, etc.) How many computing technologies from 1969 are we still in daily contact with?

Nassim Taleb has this nice heuristic that says that the expected future life of something is proportional to how long it's been around.

So ASCII text will outlast HTML, because it preceded it. And HTML will outlast JavaScript.

So you might guess that Unix will outlast even the web. I doubt that a deep knowledge of Unix will become obsolete in the lifetime of anyone alive today. We might ubiquitous computing and networked sensors and AI, but it seems like all of those things will be running on Unix.

(note: this is of course a heuristic)

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Re:The Programming Steamroller Waits For No One (2013) by TacticalCoder on Sunday February 09, 2014 @04:33PM (#7207365)

"How many computing technologies from 1969 are we still in daily contact with?"

Lisp? We're all reading HN which is written in some Lisp dialect. There are also quite a few Clojure devs in here (including me) and a few using other Lisp dialects (and participating in flamewars about what a true Lisp is or is not). Don't know if it counts ^ ^

And then not 1969 but 1976: daily Emacs user here...

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Re:The Programming Steamroller Waits For No One (2013) by chubot on Sunday February 09, 2014 @04:49PM (#7207452)

Yup, Lisp will definitely be around long after most of the technologies we read about today :)

I have yet to do much with Clojure, mainly because I'm not really in the JVM ecosystem. But I think its focus on immutability is a great contribution to Lisp and will last a long time. It's an idea that transcends a particular implementation.

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