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Developer's View: Real Life Inspirations Or Abstract Ideas?
StormDriver writes "According to writer Marc Prensky, most of us come from a generation of digital immigrants. It basically means the modern web developed during our lifetime, it is a place we migrated to, discovering its potential. But people aged 20 and younger are not like that at all. They are digital natives, they've spent their whole lives here. 'Hey, let's do a digital version of our college facebook' is a digital immigrant's idea, just like 'Hey, let's make something like a classifieds section of a newspaper, only this one will be online.' Or 'Hey, let's make an online auction housel.' 'Hey, let's make a place for online video rentals.' The thing is, recreating items, ideas and interactions from the physical realm on the Web already ran its course." To me, this sounds like the gripe that "Everything that can be invented, has been invented." There are a lot of real-life services and experiences that have yet to be replicated, matched, or improved upon in the online realm; I wouldn't want people to stop taking inspiration from "old fashioned" goods as starting points for digital products.
"Hey, lets make another Facebook, only more betterer!"
Low hanging fruit has been picked? Not hardly!
XML sucks, HTTPS was never as good as SHTTP, we don't have much experience with HTML5 yet so we don't have a good feel for its limitations. IPv6 certainly won't be the final word in network protocols. Plenty of room for more new programming languages, since coding is still awkward and painful. I learned of an interesting one called Racket just last month. Perl 6 is still being developed. The latest revision to C/C++ just came out last year. Code reuse is still incredibly messy, and languages still mostly reinvent the wheel, recreating libraries natively because it's still too hard to call library functions written in a different language. Java is especially bad there. The whole OOP thing with CORBA, and marshaling or serializing, never really caught on, and we still use an awful lot of plain old C library code with wrappers. We could really, really use a good standard for creating and interfacing with library code. And SWIG? Bleh, major code bloat. Imagine what it would take to persuade OS developers to migrate away from C to a better language. C is old, but some still use Fortran and even Cobol. On the hardware side, we're still stuck with all kinds of legacy ugliness going all the way back to the original PC design. Be glad they at least anticipated there could be more than one operating system, and designed the hard drive I/O routines to work with partitions.
"Real" AI and space travel is sexy. But there's a great deal of more mundane work to do. It won't be glamorous but it will be a big help.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
A real problem is that I have to send my credit card credentials to a website in order to buy something. The real fix would be for me to be able to buy something off a website without sending them my credentials. Instead, I'd only have to communicate to my credit card provider that I authorized the site to charge a certain amount to my credit card, and have the money transferred, without the site knowing the information on my card. The same could be done for recurring payments. Authorize the merchant to charge a certain amount against my card every month, without them actually having to know my credit card information. This is kind of like paypal, but without the middle man.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.