[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: More predictions to mull over
Life is dead or dieing, Elliotte. And more is born to do that everyday. Is HTML actually evolving or is it on life support because of the deployment (ie, in a certain part of the lifecycle)? OTOH, certain fundamentals remain the same and we keep tweaking them to emphasize some part of a design to achieve some term of optimization for a given period of constraints. Note Mike and I both have used the combustion engine examples. I've cited the influence of the Grand Prix over that and so on. What you might want to dwell on is the fundamental aspect of REST over the application zeitgeist of WS. REST is fine and most of us understand how to use it. The next question is, is it enough if you need reliable predictable contractable testable replicable server side services and do you want to write very dense difficult noisy contracts to procure that or do you want to cite a document that does that for you. I suspect that you haven't had that job yet. When you finally enter the "Wow! He still writes HTML? How antedeluvian is that??" phase of your career and find yourself being promoted up and out into the proposals department, you may change your mind about contract-based services. Or not. Some people are making very good money because they are the only ones in their company who know how to code in Cobol and Fortran. Think of them as 'coroner coders'. It comes to all living things to carry their dead around boxed or shrinkwrapped or left out on the back porch to let the chickens nibble on. It's not the velocity. It's the mass. You can handle a two-ton satellite in orbit at 17,500 MPH with four-gloved hands, but if you make a single mistake, it still crushes your fingers. It may not be moving fast but given the relative platform density, there is still a lot of WS-platform out there. Is that pretty or edgy? Well, no. Should it be? VRML is dead except we are still using it because we have the tools and the books. Raph Koster says 'no one serious uses it' but he writes games and hasn't paid attention to the contracts coming out of the Beltway. X3D is alive and the books are in the pipeline. The tools are immature. As I said, convenience trumps elegance. VRML and X3D are citable. Koster is merely quotable. If the majority of desktops and profitable applications support WS because of the deployment, ugly lives for as long as it is convenient. Enterprise apps may not be heroic but they pay better. Adorable is great for Hollywood and edgy is great for New York. London gets by on ugly but well-scripted. len From: Elliotte Harold [mailto:elharo@m...] Len Bullard wrote: > We've had the same '. is dead' predictions for lots of languages and > technologies. We've been having the same debates on the VRML/X3D lists > since those statements from the gamers that 'no one serious does > anything with.." some months ago. Fortran is still out there, Cobol is > still out there and any time someone says 'yes, but who cares', check > out which language is running a lot of missile control systems and which > one is still running a lot of banks. Densities change but not the fact > of for a sizable x there is some evidence of n. > Dead or dying. CORBA is dead. DOS, Cobol and Fortran are dying. I teach at an engineering school, and I'm one of the few people there (including among the faculty) who knows anything about Fortran. I don't know anyone who still uses it, though probably there are still a few physics professors who are happily coding away in Fortran, but they'll all retire in the next few few years. Languages like COBOL and Fortran are petrified fossils. So are operating systems like DOS, OS/2, and Mac OS 9. There is a huge amount of useful legacy software that keeps chugging along on these platforms, but nobody is dong anything new with them. At most they're carefully maintaining the old stuff. They're like decommissioned satellites left in a slowly decaying orbit for years or decades. Eventually however they will burn up in the atmosphere. On the other hand tech like CORBA and OSI that never achieved orbit or even left the launch pad in the first place are thoroughly dead. They don't even have much of a legacy to support. Maybe VRML was written off prematurely and will still take off. I don't know. But there are a lot of dead technologies out there. Java, C++, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, XML are all alive and are the hearts of vibrant ecosystems of new code. It's not just the size of x that matters. It's the velocity.
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