

Was Steve Yegge Right? - nhashem
http://regularlyexpressed.com/was-steve-yegge-right/

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brianleb

      Prediction #9:   Apple’s laptop sales will exceed those   
      of HP/Compaq, IBM, Dell and Gateway combined by 2010.
      Reason for prediction: Macs rule. Windows laptops are as 
      exciting as a shiny disco ball in the ceiling.
    

Honestly, to me, that's just absurd on a fundamental level. And the reasoning
just reeks of fanboy-ism (note: I have no idea who Steve Yegge is - I just
clicked through out of curiosity).

    
    
      I tried to actually Google the market share for Macbooks, 
      but it’s probably impossible to find an absolute number.
    

Not hard. Found the following with two searches in just a few minutes:

Circa Q2'08 (so, four years after the prediction) [1]: Apple laptop North
American market share 10.6%. Dell and HP are both 21%, Acer is just under 15%,
Toshiba is 9%, and "All Others" are 22%.

Circa Q1'11 Apple Notebooks are 5.7% global market share [2] and Apple is 8.5%
of shipped notebooks + desktops [3].

At best, Apple COO Tim Cook says in Oct. 2010 that 20% of sold laptops +
desktops are Macs [4].

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/09/apple-gains-us-
mar...](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2008/09/apple-gains-us-market-share-
in-laptops.ars)

[2] [http://www.ventureoutsource.com/contract-
manufacturing/taiwa...](http://www.ventureoutsource.com/contract-
manufacturing/taiwanese-odms-toothache-apple)

[3] [http://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-loses-
its-Q1-2011-market-s...](http://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-loses-
its-Q1-2011-market-share-position-to-Apple-in-the-U-S.51580.0.html)

[4] [http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/App-Store-comes-
to...](http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/App-Store-comes-to-Mac-
in-90-days-new-iLife-Suite-and-trimmer-MacBook-Air-available-now/1287600183)

~~~
ender7
However, he _is_ correct if you just examine laptop sales among college
students:

<http://daringfireball.net/misc/2011/07/u-texas.png>

When I worked IT for my college, we saw a similar pattern amongst residential
computer registrations - almost all of students' machines were laptops, and
the majority of those were running OS X.

This might not have been such a big deal back in the day (once they graduated,
they probably got a job that forced them to use a PC, and so they stuck with
one), but the PC landscape is changing dramatically. Nowadays, it's a lot
easier to mainline a Mac after graduating.

~~~
brianleb
Definitely true and I agree with all points. I would wonder how much of the
overall laptop-buying population is made up of college students, though? Over
time I could definitely see a significant effect (and as is stated elsewhere,
Apple is growing much more in that market right now than others), but I would
expect that to take upwards of a decade, as you can only 'convert' so many new
college students each year.

Given the higher baseline cost of Macs, I would expect them to be more
prevalent among college students because a) those people can afford to go to
college and b) financial aid makes the difference between a $500 HP and a
$1000 MacBook seem much less significant. I am still surprised by that
infographic, though: 52% OSX wireless users! I probably would have guessed
something more along the lines of 33%.

~~~
Cushman
You're surprised because you haven't been on a college campus in the last five
years. I'm amazed it's that low.

------
jleader
I think he's actually somewhat correct about multi-threaded programming, at
least in some areas. Multi-threading works (aside from all the problems Yegge
mentions) when you're dealing with multiple cores in a single box, but it
doesn't scale at all well across a distributed system. As a counter-example,
Map-Reduce has exploded since Yegge's post, as a way to get practical parallel
speedups for certain kinds of tasks, without even having to think about race
conditions, deadlocks, etc. Now Map-Reduce isn't useful for all the same
problems as multi-threading, so one isn't going to replace the other, but it's
just an example of an area where the multi-threading paradigm fails.

~~~
njharman
Totally agree. "out of favor" != "gone".

Distributed, message/actor models have exploded. There are better options to
multithreading now. Only niches (often front end ui something) need
multithreading.

~~~
nickik
Depending on what you meen by multithreading. Is multithreading when you use
threads (and locks) directly or if your using multible threads in your
programm in some way.

Acctully using threads probebly went back because of Actor Framworks, better
understanding off developers, STM ....

------
jeffdavis
"Prediction #1: XML databases will surpass relational databases in popularity
by 2011."

WRONG.

Aren't we capable of calling "false" statements "false" anymore? I can't
believe that the author defended this prediction.

I'm sure you can twist the words "popular", "database", and "XML" around
enough to try to make some argument that he was almost right. But if you read
the full original prediction it's even more clear that he was as wrong as it
is possible to be in a prediction.

~~~
code_duck
It seems instead of XML databases, we're seeing JSON databases. True that
they're far from surpassing or even nearing relational databases in
popularity. Rleatoipnal databases are rather fundamental software, and there
is such a vast amount of code and habits related to their use, that the
prediction that they will be 'surpassed' buy something else only 6-7 years out
is rather brash.

~~~
jeffdavis
"It seems instead of XML databases, we're seeing JSON databases."

Even that one grain of truth doesn't hold up if you read his original
prediction. He was talking about pretty XML-specific stuff like XPath and
XQuery, and even things like DTDs and Schemas; so schema-less document stores
just don't fit Yegge's story.

I don't have anything against Yegge for making such a prediction, and I'm sure
he's not all that concerned that he was wrong. However, I don't think the
author is being intellectually honest when he tries to twist it into a
"partially right", and I do have something against that.

------
libria
_Prediction #8: Someday I will voluntarily pay Google for one of their
services._

Pretty close; there have been recent signs of this. Appengine is switching to
a stricter payment plan. Google Apps for domain reduced their free user limit
to 10. A lot of free API's are shutting down and some new ones require billing
(Prediction, Storage, Search).

Although, in his particular case, it's Google paying him for his services...

~~~
gcp
Some things like the online photo albums have pretty low limits (1G storage).
If I end up paying it will probably be for that. Despite having my own web-
server, the link-in to my Android phone is huge convenience factor.

------
presidentender
Steve Yegge is always right; unfortunately, sometimes he's right too early.
This was the case with his game, Wyvern, which was a something akin to a
beautifully retro meeting of Nethack and Everquest... with a client for the
Sharp Zaurus.

If it'd been iPhone, it would have taken off. It was just way too early.

~~~
jeffdavis
"Steve Yegge is always right; unfortunately, sometimes he's right too early."

What year do you think XML databases will take over?

~~~
Macha
I believe the point he's making (which I don't nessecarily agree with) is that
he's right about the changes in direction, but he tries to estimate the result
in the context of what currently exists.

So for example, he got it right that mobile games would be big, but they were
big on iOS which didn't exist at the time he tried to make use of it.

Nd he was right that relational databases would decline. At at the time not
relational meant XML. He couldn't predict the NoSQL of today, because that
just didn't exist.

Personally, I think that argument is just retroactively applying meanings that
weren't there, however.

------
pchristensen
#7: The mobile/wireless/handheld market is still at least 5 years out.

This was written in 2004. iPhone App Store launched July 2008. Pretty good
prediction.

Overall interesting to read these and see how many of them he nailed.

------
Rexxar
Concerning "Prediction #4": I have the impression that the author of the
article look at the global Java market share whereas Steve Yegge speaks of the
market share of java _on the jvm_.

~~~
Confusion
The global Java market share has never been above 50%. Moreover, the author
combines achieving 4 and 5.

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delinka
"Prediction #10: In five years’ time, most programmers will still be average."

Just remember, half the population is below average intelligence.

~~~
joeburke
You only have a 50% chance of this being correct.

Replace "average" with "median" and you're at 100%.

~~~
gcp
Isn't it normally distributed? In which case using average is fine.

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wingo
I enjoyed the article; a bit fluffy, but fun. However, oversee.net? The thing
that comes to mind directly is "overseer", in the southern slaveocracy sense.
(I say this as one who grew up in the southern US.) What an unfortunate name!

~~~
dpark
Really, you get "southern slaveocracy" from "oversee"? Oversee just means to
watch over, to monitor.

Edit: Seriously, do a search on the term "oversee". It's a common term and
it's related to slavery the same way "driver" is, which is to say basically
not at all.

<http://www.google.com/search?q=oversee>

~~~
wingo
Really, I do. "Oversee" can be used in a sentence as a verb without the
connotation. But when I see "oversee.net" -- the noun -- I think "overseer",
and "overseer" is not a word that I can hear without thinking "slavery".

~~~
dpark
I don't get the slavery connection from "overseer", either. That's still a
common term, and not closely tied to slavery. It just means someone who
oversees, a manager/supervisor/foreman. Dictionaries (the ones I checked at
least) don't even mention slavery, though I did notice a lot of slavery-
related "related searches" on dictionary.com.

Obviously what you see is what you see, so you're not wrong, but I think the
connection isn't something most people would see.

