
Ask HN: What is the cutting edge in the programming world right now? - sidcool
I am always learning about the tech that I am currently working on in my project.  It&#x27;s generally a generation behind the cutting edge.   (E.g. Doing Scala microservices right now).<p>What should I spend some time learning that is cutting edge in programming?<p>Any papers I should read?  Any books? Etc.
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niftich
Machine Learning! Neural Networks! Serverless! </hype>

But all hype has an element of truth. A sibling comment linked the Infoworld
article ( _edit: now deleted, here it is_ [1]), it has some good points
(binary protocols, IoT, WebAssembly), but is missing Machine Learning and
other pattern-recognition-y, data analysis-flavored things and under the 'AI'
umbrella, as a matured version of when we used to talk about 'Big Data'.

[1] [http://www.infoworld.com/article/3022874/application-
develop...](http://www.infoworld.com/article/3022874/application-
development/9-predictions-for-the-future-of-programming.html)

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nprescott
It might depend on whether you differentiate between cutting edge and hype.
Scala (for sure) and micro-services (probably) are still very niche. It's not
as though there has been a generation of software written in them - they've
had several years to pick up steam and now they aren't "exciting". Off the top
of my head the things that are exciting enough to make news simply by existing
is "serverless" XYZ and "AI" where AI is never really defined well enough to
pin down.

You would probably be better served to learn something you are interested in
than being able to say you are fluent in the NN library du jour.

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surfyogi
Just my humble opinion, from what I've seen recently:

a) NodeJS microservices - seem to be preferred for most applications because
they are so efficient and simple to maintain; single threaded and async, so
it's very different from Scala. Also the ecosystem is progressing very
quickly, NPM, etc. b) THRIFT - REST has an alternative, and it's really
interesting to see Websockets, and binary encoding/decoding using THRIFT
protocol, but not as simple as HTTP/REST in practice c) Cassandra - easily
scalable and good enough for most simple features, has it's drawbacks as well;
good for what could become gigantic operations

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b0mb
Functional programming?

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sidcool
Doing that already with Scala. But not sure if it's cutting edge. It's
actually older than programming itself :)

