Also the most likely tonic to platform churn, reinvented wheels, codebase growth. The culture will flip towards lambasting anything that hasn't been put through the wringer as "untrustworthy".
An additional tragedy not mentioned is the broken circle of trust between developers, users, and service providers.
In the future, developers will be more skeptical of promising platforms, and users will be less willing to turn over their content and data to platforms that may only temporarily in a state of free and openness.
On the bright side, this may lead to more explicit, contractual openness for commercial platforms or the stronger emergence of completely open platforms as users and developers learn the lesson that it matters.
Social startups might take this to heart - as Google and others already have. Users and developers may well start to pay attention to that buried EULA and its back-out provisions designed to make sure you can assure investors that betraying your base for cash will always be a possibility.
It seems like industry is perpetually locked in a death-spiral of creating the most "native-like" meta-platform that tries to mimic whatever proprietary platform is currently big. Eventually, another proprietary platform emerges and captures mindshare, and the nerds get angry at the proprietary-ness and start a new meta-platform emerges with the same promises of "eventually it will great." Due to idealism and politics, the meta-platform attracts a huge amount of smart devs who ultimately are trying to replicate something that people already have.
I'm sorry to sound grumpy, it just seems like everything runs in circles and nobody seems to care or notice. Maybe tech is much better when it's applied to tough domains.
Prediction: we'll see a lot of small issues that don't matter. Copy writing will go to shit, notification numbers won't show up, website may even go down for an hour. Everyone will claim that this is because the best engineers left.
The company will stay up and the app will work fine ultimately. Everyone will claim this is because the best engineers who left wrote unbreakable code.
- Pendulum will swing to server side rendering, most likely using live view style of techniques, ironically even in JS land
- AI will be critized more, but once developer jobs are threatened, only then concrete talks about doing something about will happen, none else will be cared enough to bother
- bigger zeitgeist shift from react to alternative SPA tools - it will enter the "enterprise" status, and will be relevant only due to things like MUI and ant design, and because "everyone else" is doing it, and devs being too afraid to suggest something else to their managers
My prediction is something will go horribly wrong, then they will go "see, we tried modern tech and it fucked us over", and they will commit to seeing their code and tech stack turn a century old before considering any updates.
It ends the same way it did the last time. A giant tech market crash, more market consolidation, and massive cultural change.
At this point, things move so fast that operating systems are shipped with known bugs, security flaws, and half baked ideas. They are then patched via over-the-net updates. I think this will stop. People will go back to more traditional development paradigms out of necessity. They also won’t completely trash code bases that have been patched to the point of being reliable and somewhat secure just to make a new thing no one wanted.
My only other prediction is that people will eventually be more conservative about picking tech stacks. They will want proven track records.
Users and UX somewhere will be thrown under the bus. The question is - will it be a heavily used multi-million dollar valuation site, or will it be a rarely-used development site?
A big part is the blur between toy and product. We disregard end-users as "sheeple" while simultaneously receiving gratification from their auth count.
I think we will look back and see this as a golden age.
Supply-chain attacks are about to destroy our current model of trust in FOSS. Much as the internet was never designed with security in mind, and so has had to have security layered on top of it, badly, our current model of trusting code from the internet is about to get badly broken.
In 10 years' time we'll look back and get all nostalgic about being able to just pull a package off Git__b without worry.
If this turns out to be true, I hope it's a watershed moment in the tech industry. Lots of middle management in other companies will be sweating since they'll need to do something better than just asking "hey, when do you think this can be done?".
Hopefully, realizing how unnecessarily shitty and bloated nearly all existing software is and rediscovering an appreciation for simplicity, reliability, and performance. There’s so much low-hanging fruit to be picked yet we let it rot on the vine.
Projects like Zig I think are the first signs that we are getting fed up with what we have.
reply