
Flash Is Dead: What Technologies Might Be Next? - tannhaeuser
https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/08/01/flash-dead-technologies-might-next/
======
newman8r
POTS over copper wire. AT&T is legally obliged to continue
offering/maintaining it (in California at least), but they don't market the
service and you have to specifically ask for it.

a lot of people aren't aware of the situation. AT&T is continually trying to
get out of their obligation (in California at least).

The fewer people who use it, the better AT&T's argument for discontinuing
service becomes.

In the event of a widespread disaster, people who can make a phone call are
going to have better access to emergency services.

~~~
bluedino
They are jacking the prices up on renewal. They wanted 4x the current rate on
every POTS line we had unless we bundled another service like wireless
(cellular), DirecTV, or GoToMeeting

~~~
thephyber
I remember paying ~$30/mo in 2012. Are you saying it would cost 50% more for
one landline than an AT&T cell line with a healthy data plan?

------
jmnicolas
I expect Microsoft to drop Windows Phones in the next 2 years, unless it
rebounds, it doesn't make financial sense to continue investing in the
platform.

~~~
frou_dh
It's interesting that the OS is not really a separate thing, after the
unification of Windows they did. So to a greater extent than Apple and
especially Google, the software side of MS's phone project gets maintained
"for free"?

~~~
wodenokoto
I imagine keeping windows compatible with 2 so different hardware platforms is
far from free.

~~~
petecox
The hardware on a Windows 10 ARM tablet is more or less the same (Snapdragon
835) as powers a mobile, only the screen is larger and they remove the app
that makes phone calls.

~~~
WorldMaker
There's even rumors that the Phone Call app will even show up on ARM tablets
with SIM cards at some point, for people that like the "phablet" thing. (Which
is hand in hand with the rumors/indications that Skype might eat the phone
call app entirely and just light up SIM-based calling if the machine is
capable, regardless of form factor, possible with inter-device VOIP
communication like it manages SMS pass-through, when enabled, now.)

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nicktelford
In my ideal world, PDF would be the next to die.

My problem isn't with PDF itself, but that it's overused in places where it
really doesn't need to be. Academic papers are the big one, where HTML would
almost always be a better choice. What's even more maddening is that papers
aren't written using Adobe's PDF tools, they're written in TeX and then
converted.

If you're an academic reading this, I implore you to please publish your
papers in HTML (alongside PDF is fine too!). It makes them far easier to read,
as browsers can reformat the document according to the readers needs.

PDF is a type-setting format for ensuring print-accurate documents. Please
stop publishing content that is meant to be consumed online in it.

~~~
pseud0r
TeX isn't that widely used outside of fields like physics, math or computer
science. Academics in others field like using Word.

~~~
moxious
TeX is great for very complicated situations, which doesn't describe what most
people do.

~~~
snorremd
(La)TeX is great when you don't want to manually handle formatting your text.
I loved writing LaTeX for the simple reason that I could focus on the content,
rather than having to constantly work on the presentation. The markup was
simple enough that it did not get in the way.

Barring technical problems I much prefer LaTeX to Word or LibreOffice Writer.

------
rio517
Is questions asked really a good metric? StackOverflow actively discourages
asking duplicate questions, and all the easy newbie questions haven't changed
in a while, it seems inevitable that certain technologies appear to decline. I
feel like traffic to questions, searches or other metrics would be a better
indicator.

In particular, is facebook api usage really in decline? I'd be very surprised.
For language/platform specific technologies, I would imagine if there were a
decline the market for devs would get less tight. I'd argue that days a
vacancy is open is a much better indicator than even raw number of job
postings.

~~~
jordiburgos
I think other measures would be more suitable.

Currently I am working with Mongoose and MongoDB. All the answers I find in
StackOverflow are more than 2 years old.

~~~
francesca
I see the most recent question answered 5 minutes ago
([https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=mongoose%20](https://stackoverflow.com/search?tab=newest&q=mongoose%20)).

~~~
jordiburgos
I didn't mean all the questions.

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tannhaeuser
What about CSS preprocessors and grid frameworks? SASS/less and Bootstrap are
heavily used right now and I like using them, but I can see the end of the
road with CSS 4 variables and CSS grid (if not with flexbox already).

------
dep_b
It's a pity to see asp.net decline, MVC is really nice with great IDE support.
If it's due to webforms dying then it's great news. It still angers me how
webforms wasted my time as a junior developer thinking it was my lack of skill
that made any page beyond the trivial extremely hard to build.

~~~
staticelf
Before, I used to hate MS and .NET. Today I work as a .NET dev and love C# and
.NET.

Honestly, I think the moves MS is doing right now is the correct ones. With
.NET Core a lot of the "heavy" stuff has been liften away and projects can
easily be run on any big OS.

I think we will soon see a rise in the use of ASP.NET. The productivity levels
you get by using .NET and Azure is just insane.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I love C# but I'm moving away from it because I don't want to end up in a
situation where my only hosting option is Azure.

~~~
staticelf
I would say that with .NET Core, there has not been a better time to choose
freely from hosting providers since you can basically run it anywhere.

You don't need to run Azure?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Maybe but I'm somewhat doubtful, Microsoft only really has an incentive to
support Linux/Apple as far as enabling development on those platforms.

------
holydude
I think this is more or less accurate. Sad to see RoR to be declining.

~~~
christophilus
I'm not a Ruby/Rails fan at all, but I work at a Rails shop. It would be
interesting to know why the decline is happening, and what alternatives are
replacing it. I suspect Elixir and Go.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Bear in mind that this is about Stack Overflow attention. It's quite possible
that there's now sufficient documentation and experience in the Rails
community that there's just less requirement for interaction with Stack
Overflow!

It also seems likely that newer developers are going to be steered towards
other solutions for web development.

~~~
beobab
If newer developers are steered elsewhere, then you have an aging population
problem, which historically leads to decline.

~~~
holydude
Well we have discussed this in other threads already :-). That's the problem
with Ruby in general that you can only solve certain problems with it. Beyond
Rails,devops and some obscure embedded stuff they do in Japan there is not
much that you can do with Ruby.

~~~
shandor
Embedded stuff in Ruby?

Now that's a story I want to hear. Any pointers?

~~~
holydude
Honestly I do not know. There was an article not long time ago mentioning that
Ruby is not popular in Japan because of Rails but because it is used in a lot
of places like embedded stuff etc.

[http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio-
engineering/2017/5/...](http://engineering.appfolio.com/appfolio-
engineering/2017/5/24/how-is-ruby-different-in-japan)

~~~
shandor
Thanks, that was really interesting. Guess I'll have to go and read on mruby
now!

------
CM30
XHTML and everything associated with it. Well okay, it's probably already
considered dead, since HTML 5 has replaced in it about 95% of contexts.

Turns out most people didn't want a web where a single syntax error could
bring down a web page and went to the more relaxed HTML 5 the minute it was
released.

And while they won't die as far as their main purpose is concerned, I suspect
webfonts will become a lot less popular in future. The idea of using them for
icons has turned out to be a non semantic nightmare that's best done with SVG
or plain old images instead. So the likes of Fontastic may not be long for
this world...

~~~
whatever_dude
You're on to something. The xhtml fiasco has a lot of parallels to Flash, when
you consider the ECMAScript history and its relation to ActionScript's
evolution.

------
melling
“If we would have been able to see Flash’s decline in advance, what other
technologies might be past their peak?”

People did see it! That one was easy. You couldn’t convince Flash users.

Anyway, save yourself some time and skip the debate. It really wasn’t worth
it.

------
micael_dias
Stack Overflow Documentation

~~~
coldtea
I see what you did here...

------
mmjaa
For me, I'm replacing any of the ol' Flash style of thinking with Lua.

Specifically, MOAI: [http://getmoai.com/](http://getmoai.com/)

MOAI gives me everything that Flash gave me, but I have better (full) control
over the stack, what goes into it, how its used, etc.

And then I just compile it all to Javascript and voila! No distribution
hassles (except where I want it: i.e. when delivering to iOS/Android app-
stores..)

------
lord_jim
CoffeeScript. It had its time but it's focus on syntax failed to address much
of what makes JavaScript difficult to work with.

jquery UI. Jquery still has some use in banging out a quick page but it too is
no longer essential

Also possibly Bootstrap. What the hell is going on with development there?

~~~
tannhaeuser
About Bootstrap: I, too, have questioned the viability of grid frameworks and
CSS preprocessors here when we have CSS grids and variables, but I think
Bootstrap is such a useful thing for a split designer/developer workflow that
it'll live on and eventually converge into using CSS grid directly in a couple
years.

Bootstrap team has made slow but steady progress over the last few weekends
and is working on documentation issues, so it looks like a new release is
imminent.

Update:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14926640)

------
amelius
> Flash Is Dead: What Technologies Might Be Next?

My vote goes to Platform-Dependent Apps.

~~~
dagenleg
Found a web developer.

~~~
amelius
Not really. I'm building apps on Web/iOS/Android. And it sucks writing the
same code for three different APIs.

It's very intellectually unfulfilling work.

~~~
swiley
Write command line apps in C. The only platform that can't run them is iOS.

~~~
thealistra
iOS can run Objective-C which is a superset of C, you can run the code
natively and use Objective-C to display it.

~~~
swiley
iOS lacks fork and kills your app if it doesn't yeild for some number of
milliseconds. It also lacks a shell and a video terminal emulator which are
kind of nice to have for these sorts of apps.

------
__sr__
I wish Java and JavaScript were next! :-)

~~~
yoz-y
I think JavaScript could be salvaged if, let's say starting with ES8, the new
version would be incompatible and old scripts would require some legacy mode.
That would allow fixing the major issues.

~~~
__sr__
The problem isn't so much with JavaScript as it is with the JavaScript
mentality - that is not to say JavaScript doesn't have a ton of problems.

No, the real problem is the mentality of cranking out new frameworks instead
of actually building something useful on top of existing ones. Every year, the
JS framework of choice changes to something new and you have no choice but to
move on because the one you were using until recently has suddenly been
dropped as the developers have moved on to the backwards incompatible next
version.

And then there is the mentality of writing libraries for the most trivial of
tasks - left padding, seriously?

~~~
yoz-y
Javascript would benefit from something like boost. Not in a sense of a
library because that already exists with lodash and underscore and what not.
But in the term of community and acceptance: "Yes, boost is bloated and not
always ideal, but it is almost always a better choice than reimplementing the
thing"

~~~
n17r4m
Personally speaking, I wish this was Meteor.js - If only there was more hoorah
for this tough as nails framework.

------
sysdyne
Javascript

------
chvid
Traditional web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, asp.net, apache wicket, jsf,
Django and so on that generate HTML on the server.

Over longer term: proprietary mobile app development platforms (windows phone,
apple ios, android).

All replaced by client side JavaScript.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
My iPad 2 disagrees.

------
egberts1
It should be JavaScript, next: because JS is not Turing-complete.

~~~
GuiA
Uh, not sure if you're referencing a joke or something, but just to make sure
no one gets confused by your post: JS absolutely is turing complete, as is
trivially demonstrated by implementing a turing machine in JS.

------
tinus_hn
Fossil fuel, hopefully.

------
jlebrech
a wasm based animation framework.

~~~
tannhaeuser
Err, the title is supposed to read "What Technologies Might Be Next [to bite
the dust]?" I guess.

A replacement for timed/declarative animation on the Web is, of course, still
needed (if for ads alone), but it looks like browsers/HTML5/JS libs are deemed
good enough so instead of multimedia runtimes/engines we're going to see
authoring tools.

Though audio/video sync and the state of SVG (and of SVG animation on FF in
particular) leaves much to be desired IMO.

~~~
coldtea
> _is, of course, still needed (if for ads alone)_

I think "needed" and "ads" should not go into the same sentence...

