

We need less Rails, Node.js, etc. and more systems research - jfe

My opinion: Too many people stitch together crap built on top of HTTP and call it revolutionary. We need to abandon, or at least migrate from, stale web technology, and pursue fundamentally new ways of computing.<p>But it seems the trend is toward keeping with what we have; kids leave school wanting to do nothing but write iPhone apps, built on technology created by men who are better than them.<p>Do the world a favor, and get smart enough to dig us out of this complacent hell-hole that is Web X.0.
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kmnc
The trend toward keeping with what we have is often mistaken as zero progress
when in reality it is more a trend towards massive evolution. If you can't
look past the "iPhone app era" how do you expect new students to? Should all
students be forced to have PhDs in AI/Distributed Computing/Quantum Mechanics?

The problem of kids leaving school wanting to write iPhone apps seems to have
nothing to do with computing at all. It seems to have everything to do with
"Get a career, make it rich, find a nice job, get married, have kids, retire",
which for a large majority of the population is all that maters. So it isn't
so much a computing problem as it is a societal problem. I imagine your rant
could swap out a few words and be used as a rant against every single academic
and industrial industry that exists today.

But, at the end of the day major companies with major dollars are building
self driving cars, space ships, virtual reality. Oh and they are also buying
companies that contain only talented people for millions of dollars to do
research. The fact that the economic landscape is pumping out computing
literate students seems to only be a good thing, regardless of their
intentions.

And yeah, the web and most of its products still suck. But that has little to
do with the technology. If you can't realize that then maybe you need to get a
bit smarter.

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Ronsenshi
> and pursue fundamentally new ways of computing.

Do you have any examples or ideas regarding that new way of computing? I'm not
even sure I understand that phrase.

Maybe you meant new way of interacting?

And why do you mention both backend technologies, phone apps and web itself?
Those are entirely different things that may rely or interact with each other,
but they are not the same.

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jfe
not so much interacting, as harnessing computing resources. plan9, though not
terribly popular in the mainstream sense, introduced very simple and effective
methods of distributed computing. the engineers broke away from the TCP model
and developed their own transport protocol for super-fast data transfer. i
personally want to see more of this.

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toddan
I think this is a natural path of software development. It is getting easier
and easier every year to make software on the foundation built by smart
engineers.

There still will be engineers that will do amazing things, but the problems
the engineers will face will be harder and the problems programmers will face
will be easier.

Just compare creating a blog with php year 2000 and creating a blog with rails
2014.

I believe that in a near future making most of the apps used by businesses
will only be a matter of setting configurations. I know this is what people
said in the 80s and we did not get there by 2000, but that dose not mean we
will not be there in the future.

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jfe
yes, perhaps i should have titled this rant "we need fewer programmers and
more engineers" :)

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wmf
Are you going to pay for it?

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oxalo
This is the key. Technological progress follows the money.

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GrahamsNumber
Do us a favor, and stop telling us what to do and do it yourself.

