Ask HN: Any hacks/ideas to identify tech trends from the bottom up? - dmagriso
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nostrademons
Turn off your "do other people like this?" filter. Also turn off your "is this
like other stuff I've used before in the past?" filter. Go try out the
technologies yourself. The stuff you like now is the stuff other people will
like in a couple years.

~~~
bbcbasic
Reminds me of when I first heard about bitcoin 2009 ish. I thought it was a
super cool idea but ... hey other people ain't into it so it can't be that
hot. Had I turned off that sheep filter I would have probably got more into it
more.

~~~
bbcbasic
And by the same token programming languages that prove correctness and 'make
illegal state un-representable' will be a growing trend in the future.

The shear number of programming languages will reach a pinnacle to where we
give up on Haskell vs. Java and just say: here are some levers - you set them
up and we'll spit you out a programming language and platform that meets your
needs.

~~~
nostrademons
Careful - applying the "do I like it myself?" principle implies that you're
doing the same tasks as the people who will make the decisions in the future.

I like Haskell etc. a lot, but I've found that in the very early stages of the
project, it's quite important to allow incorrect code and illegal state
because _you don 't know what "correct" means yet_. New products are almost
always built by making sure the happy path works and not worrying about
anything else, because if you worry about anything else, it will take you that
much longer to bring something to market.

Languages that prove correctness have the unfortunate position of being most
useful once the project has already grown big. At that point, the programming
language used has already been decided, and it's usually whatever was popular
for toy projects 10 years ago.

I do think we'll see more languages that take the "immutable by default"
route, but allow escape hatches for when you really need to break the rules.
Even when prototyping, _most_ of your data structures can be immutable, you
just occasionally need to monkey-patch something or alter some state from
inside a loop.

~~~
bbcbasic
Yes I agree Haskell is not a panacea. I see the future as having a lot of
control over your language. You won't say I use Haskell or I use Python. You'd
say "I program" and use a custom language to suit your needs.

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S4M
Probably scraping websites like Hacker News or Github on a daily basis and see
what new things are surfacing. For example, what are the projects on Github
that are getting new followers faster, or what words appear often on the front
page of Hacker News now, but not six months ago?

~~~
Mimick
This. And it would be cooler if you used GitHub as a dictionary of keywords
while the trends being checked on Twitter.

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JSeymourATL
Have you tried Google Trends? > [http://smallbusinessbc.ca/article/how-use-
google-trends-perf...](http://smallbusinessbc.ca/article/how-use-google-
trends-perform-market-research/)

------
ky3
The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -- Alan Kay

