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.
The short form is, nothing convenient ever
really dies. As long as it does a job someone wants to do with a
tool because they know how to use that tool and even a few or one tool maker to
support it, it keeps on keeping on. The idea that one language,
technology, or standard will prevail over a very large population of users and
uses (what the ‘web’ is in the final analysis) without exception is
just silly. Plurality isn’t just an inconvenient condition of
the zeitgeist; it is the nature of it. So when I read about ‘elephants
in the room’, or this new thing is the winner and this old thing is the
loser, yadda yadda, I know I am reading ambitious nonsense or simply,
propaganda.
Do things improve? As long as they
don’t do everything everyone wants and for some value-exchange they can
be, someone will. That leads to the next need and like water following
gravity through a craggy slope, they find a path. The path looks
inevitable to the observer, but only that face of the rock and the fact of
gravity over water are. That is enough to make reasonably accurate
predictions even if water reshapes the rock. The path is local. The
rock and the water and gravity are the globals. The laws of big numbers
are still very much in force unless the floor manager catches you counting
cards.
The ironic and hilarious thing to me is
that the very people who tell us no predictions are possible tell us they know
that WS has lost once and for all. They told us minimization and
multi-way links had lost once and for all. DTDs were triumphantly
declared dead. “The power of the will” and so on…
Caucasian caca.
Screw robot wisdom. Embrace street
smarts: if there is a buyer, there will be a seller and a supply and a
competitor. Same as it ever was.
len
From: Michael Champion
[mailto:mc@x...]
I see that Elliotte Harold has published another set
of XML predictions http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-xml2007predictions.html
This set particularly intrigued me because they remind me very much of what my
2002 predictions might have been if I had written them down. 5 years ago, as
best I recall without digging through the xml-dev archives, I would have
predicted more or less what he is predicting for this year:
-
XQuery would be close to a Recommendation and fuel
demand for native XML databases of the sort my then-employer developed.
-
I don’t think Atom was even a glimmer in
2002, but I’m sure that by 2003 the RSS mess was getting pretty ugly and
I thought that Atom would clean it up.
-
XForms seemed ready to provide a non-hacky way to
generate real XML data from a browser.
-
An XML processing model soon would validate the
idea of XML pipelines (Software AG also had an XML pipeline product at the time
and we co-submitted the processing model note http://www.w3.org/Submission/2002/01/)
-
The Semantic Web would continue to be a longshot
due to inherent difficulties with authoritative metadata.
-
StarOffice’s clean XML format would finally
provide a credible alternative to MS Office.
-
People would grok that XML+CSS and/or XSLT in the
browser made all the ugly hassles forcing semantic markup into HTML unnecessary
-
The web services stack would collapse under its own
complexity, and alternatives along the lines of Ruple / JavaSpaces / XMLSpaces
would emerge as a way to get enterprise-ready quality of service with REST-like
simplicity.
-
Alternatives to IE would flourish (I think I was an
Opera devotee back then)
-
There would be a backlash against XML’s
complexity and serious danger of a counter-revolution (http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/02/champion.html
was written in 2001, but I still Believed in 2002)
I’ll recuse myself from the Microsoft-related
predictions this time around, but the only prediction in these lists that I
still agree with is the Semantic Web one (“The Achilles heel of the Semantic
Web may well be the complete disinterest of most authors in producing anything
remotely approximating metadata for their pages” as Elliotte put it in
his article linked above.) I also think I know why I was wrong about some
of the others back then (and why I believe Elliotte is likely to be wrong this
year): People just don’t seem to care about the ugliness of
RSS/OPML, HTML forms, MS Office XML formats, the WS-* stack, and dear old XML
itself. They don’t want something that “changes the architecture of
the house”, they want to slap on a new coat of paint if things get too
hideous. What they do care about is whether the technologies that are
easiest to adopt are less horrible than what they are currently doing without
them. Or as Steve Yegge put it in his widely-linked piece http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-language.html
“If you want to spare yourself a lot of angst in deciding
which programming language to use, then I recommend this simple rule: Go ugly
early.” A corollary might be “If everyone is going ugly, don’t
bet that beauty will prevail.”
I’m not completely sure I disagree with Elliotte’s
prediction about WS-* “Even a derailed train has a lot of momentum, so
people will still be talking about Web services in 2007. However, nobody will
be listening.” I don’t have firsthand knowledge of this stuff
anymore, but it does seems inconceivable that so many companies would spend so
much money, and so many smart people would spend their time, on standardizing a
train wreck that “nobody” is paying attention to. On the
other hand, this is more or less the story of CORBA – lots of time and
money spent on something that has vastly underperformed relative to its initial
hype. Still, I tend to agree with Eric Newcomer http://blogs.iona.com/newcomer/archives/000457.html
“WS-* has a lot of critics but no good proposals for alternatives. …The
adoption of Web services is increasing year over year, and yet the opposition
voices grow louder.” In other words, it looks like the enterprisey
people have “gone ugly early” but there’s no train wreck in
progress. But I would love to hear dissent from people who do have
eyewitness accounts of the alleged train wreck.
So, was I on target in 2002 and now it’s just
the evil mind control rays from Redmond Building 666 that keep me from seeing
that the time is NOW and that beauty really will prevail this year… or is
Elliotte in the same reality distortion field that I was in 5 years ago? I
guess we’ll know in 11 months.
Cart
