TIOBE December 2015 - D rose 5 positions

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 8 January 2016 at 19:21:30 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> On Friday, 8 January 2016 at 18:31:37 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> decide that for yourself.  In any case, since it's still using 
>> the same client-server approach as the web, I don't think it 
>> matters: that entire approach is doomed.
>
> Still wishful thinking... ;) You seem to take a political 
> stance on this. That's ok, but if it isn't commercial friendly 
> it won't gain traction easily.

How is it "political?"  My prediction is entirely geared around 
hardware and software realities.

>> usually cycles them every couple days between customers.  In 
>> any case, not a real problem with current p2p tech, which 
>> doesn't assume it.
>
> Ok, I've never used p2p on mobile. I don't use p2p on the 
> desktop anymore either. I generally avoid apps that connect to 
> random servers. It makes your connection and machine more 
> vulnerable to attacks.

Perhaps, but not if you're just sharing data with friends over 
p2p tech, as you'd be doing most of the time.  If you're 
accessing pirated media, of course that's a different story.

>> Did any companies have more critical mass than Microsoft with 
>> Windows and Intel with x86 chips?  Yet, they missed the 
>> largest computing platform of them all, the smartphone, which 
>> Apple rode to become the largest and most profitable company 
>> on the planet.  You greatly overestimate the value of "mass" 
>> in this day and age.
>
> Windows still has critical mass in businesses. Microsoft also 
> missed the Internet, but managed somehow to dominate it 
> eventually, for over a decade, with IE, and still has a 
> dominant position alongside Chrome. The tail for IE and Windows 
> is looooong. I even have a machine with XP still, because of 
> software I have on it.

Well, we're almost a decade into the mobile wave, and Microsoft 
has not been able to leverage their "critical mass" to get more 
than 3% share.  With Apple and Google launching two-in-one 
devices recently, they're going head-on after the PC market next.

> Smartphones took over the feature-phone market, not the 
> desktop. Yet many people prefer feature phones still. I do. I 
> use a tablet in my backpack, and a cheap robust feature phone 
> in my jacket, it has 30 days battery life and is basically 
> unbreakable (I drop it into the ground/pavement frequently). 
> Smartphones are fashionable gadgets, but not very practical 
> (big size, breaks easily, no battery life) or particularly 
> useful. But because they are fashionable people try to invent 
> use scenarios for them, thus you gets lots of "superfluous" 
> apps, making them seem like a necessity. "You need one in order 
> to be part of society". But that is rubbish.

Except feature phones are not really computing devices, whereas 
smartphones now ship with ARM chips that are more powerful than 
laptop chips from 3-4 years ago, so they've been sapping the PC 
market too, whose sales have been dropping for years.  And most 
people prefer smartphones, which have been selling more than 
feature phones worldwide for a couple years now.

If you're dropping your phone all the time, don't want to charge 
it at night, and don't want to access the internet on the go, 
yes, a feature phone is better for _you_.  However, that places 
you in a _very small_ group: most everybody prefers a smartphone, 
with current feature phone sales primarily to those who cannot 
afford a smartphone.

I agree that there's a lot of hype around smartphones and you 
certainly don't need one to be part of "society," but they _are_ 
very useful.  Having an online map with my GPS location with me 
at all times, supplemented with photos and other info about all 
the local restaurants and stores nearby is a killer app.  Perhaps 
you have not tried Google Maps, but it is really worth the price 
of a smartphone, not to mention the camera and all the other 
stuff you get.

> The same goes for "you have to be on Facebook in order to be 
> part of society". I got into such social media 20+ years ago, 
> got bored with it 10 years ago. We had access to iPAQs with 
> wireless networking 15 years ago. If you get access to tech 
> ahead of the curve (like 10+ years) and the actual realization 
> of it becomes rather bland... And you can just sit down and 
> wait for it to taper off.

I have never joined a social network, not Orkut, friendster, 
twitter, any of them.  If there was a way to share photos with a 
p2p-based open standard, I'd use that though.

> That is not true for the web. I was underimpressed with the web 
> when it was introduced. Today I am impressed. It is dominating 
> the desktop severely.

What changed?

> The enabling factor of mobile apps is not mind-blowing on the 
> same level. I am under-impressed. Ipad is an excellent gaming 
> platform, a decent reader and browser unit. Chat I got fed up 
> with in 1992... ;)

It is mind-blowing when you consider how much computing power is 
in such a small device. :) Maybe you don't get around much, but 
having a mobile assistant with you at all times is great, 
particularly when visiting new areas or cities.

> The only big negative for web tech is the lack of a solution 
> for small/micro-payments.

Heh, I think micropayments will be the killer business model for 
p2p. :) I wonder if it can ever really be done for the web, 
considering all the security issues in the web stack.  That's 
another place where the complexity of the web stack kills it, all 
the security holes that pop up.

>> Open source would definitely be a big piece of the p2p wave, 
>> as you could get a lot more done with less source using each, 
>> but I think there will be a big role for new business models 
>> too.
>
> First you need to fix vulnerability issues such as DoS and 
> breakin. P2P isn't viable as the general paradigm until that is 
> fixed.

Has the web fixed all its vulnerabilities?  Of course not, so 
that's hardly a deal-breaker.  p2p would be easier to secure.

>> No idea what this means, you think the web won because it was 
>> open source?  It was an open standard, but it certainly was 
>> not open source when it won in the '90s.
>
> I think the web managed to keep an open document model because:
>
> 1. There were enough good  free widespread browsers to prevent 
> a closed binary protocol from emerging.
>
> 2. The standards emerged from an open infrastructure project 
> that had wide support in the academic community and therefore 
> also among programmers. Meaning: society as a whole was behind 
> it.
>
> IE6 created issues for developers, but not for the open format, 
> although the immature browser wars was far from ideal and had 
> some negative effects.

You mention open formats several times, but none of that has 
anything to do with open source, which was a non-factor in the 
web browser's rise.  And IE created several issues for the open 
format, they were just worked away over time.

> One problem for new projects is that commercial interests will 
> try to displace the tech before it gains widespread adoption. 
> That has happened with chat. Over and over.

I wouldn't call it "displace" as much as co-opt, ;) as they're 
still building pretty much the same tech.  And there's nothing 
wrong with that in principle, in fact, the web would've likely 
gone nowhere if Netscape hadn't formed and driven it.  The 
problems arise when they get overly proprietary and start 
lawyering and patenting everything up, an unfortunate side effect 
of the legal system and greed.

The p2p wave will have to be driven by commercial models: open 
source is not going to do it alone, though it will play a big 
role, as it does in any big tech these days.  I don't think it'd 
be too hard to avoid the commercial mistakes of the past, however.