
Ask HN: Long held tech taboos being broken? - victorhugo31337
The following articles question long held beliefs
or techniques in the tech industry.  What other taboo topics are worth questioning or investigating?<p>Object Oriented Programming:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM<p>IPv6 notation:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zerotier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;?p=724<p>Virtual Memory:
https:&#x2F;&#x2F;matildah.github.io&#x2F;posts&#x2F;2016-01-30-unikernel-security.html
======
api
Not sure I can distill it to a single 'taboo', but the SSD revolution is
definitely upending a lot of conventional wisdom about storage and how it must
be used.

With SSDs:

\- Read and write are radically faster and will get faster still

\- Seek time does not exist

\- Fragmentation is irrelevant

\- Concurrent random access is at least technically possible, at least to far
enough regions that they reside on different physical flash units/sections of
the chip.

In short: it's slower non-volatile RAM.

The next generation of SSD will be wired into the DRAM bus, presenting itself
to the OS not as a "drive" (drive buses will be _gone_ ) but as a non-volatile
region of RAM.

That's going to radically change how we do storage in lots of ways and
probably upend dozens of "taboos." Here's a few predictions:

\- Obsolescence of read/write based file IO APIs in favor of mmap() for all
persistent objects. Everything is "memory." Files are memory, objects are
memory, etc. There are just different types of memory: RAM, fast NV, slow NV.
(Slow NV would be spinning disk or remote storage.)

\- Obsolescence of byzantine caching schemes... just access stuff.

\- As a side effect of these: obsolescence of database queries/responses.
Instead data will just be accessed as variables in your code with no
intermediate layers. The productivity gain will be insane.

Also... I am the author of the IPv6 notation post on the ZeroTier blog. I
_never_ thought a little gripe with some suggested alternative ideas would get
over a million hits in two days. Guess I hit some kind of nerve. :P

Edit: I decided to bang out a followup to the IPv6 post:

[https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=774](https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=774)

------
MalcolmDiggs
When React was released it pushed against some long-held (and still widely
held) beliefs about separation of concerns, etc.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY)

Years later, it's still a major point of contention, and a bit of a taboo.

