Computer Revolutions and where they come from
The Fishbowl has some interesting thoughts on where software revolutions come from:
Look at Java, recently described on Bruce Eckel's weblog thusly, citing Paul Prescod: "He called COBOL and Java neanderthal languages that have no descendents on the evolutionary tree.". Java has great libraries and right now, great momentum, but it's a dead-end. It has no future. It has nothing to evolve into. Its only likely long-lived descendant is C#, a language that, if it survives, will do so for the same reasons that Visual Basic survived so far beyond BASIC's use-by date. This is the source of my disquiet about Web Services. Microsoft are telling me they'll be big. IBM are telling me they'll be big. Some very respected developers are enthusiastic, but most are sitting back wondering what the fuss is, and have been for three or four years now. The momentum just hasn't gathered. SOAP and XML-RPC are both great solutions to a particular range of problems, but we're just going to have to face the fact that the chance of them becoming a revolution, as promised, are slim. Shortly, some technology is going to appear and blow my socks off. But it's more likely to appear in some experimental corner of JBoss 4.0 than it is in J2EE 1.4 or in .NET. And it's quite likely going to appear in Python or Ruby, or even coded in C by some college student or lab assistant who has thought of a really neat way to solve a real problemin the real world, and wants to share that solution with the rest of us. And we'll take it, and use it in ways the inventor never dreamed of. That's where revolutions come from.I'm seeing more and more evidence that developers are ready for something else. The Smalltalk Community needs to be prepared if we want to be one of the answers
