[OT] Windows dying

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 14:29:27 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> You want to be able to compile D programs that go on a smart 
> phone because that's where the growth of computer users is 
> coming from.

That's not all that obvious. I think a lot of the adults who got 
computers in the mid 90s did so to be able to access WWW, and 
that this segment will be ok with tablets or just phones. And 
mostly web-apps in addition to banking/tickets and social apps. I 
think the majority of this not-so-sophisticated segment is quite 
limited in where they go after the novelty of mobile apps is 
weaning.

In addition you have the kids/teens/young adults market that used 
to be C64, Nintendo, Sega, Playstation etc. I think that market 
segment is somewhat stable in what they go for, but will be 
swayed by the latest fashion/marketing. So, it is increasing 
because third world countries get access, but same behaviour in 
some ways. And as such could move to a completely new platform 
quite quickly because kids have a very low threshold for moving 
to new tech.

> Thus, it's good to be able to compile programs for that 
> platform, but it doesn't mean that work done to improve the 
> experience of programmers on other platforms is a waste of time.

Well, it is possible that web development will move to less 
demanding platforms, but is also quite obvious that to get to 
next generation of programming languages with heavy duty static 
analysis and software synthesis you need a magnitude more power 
than current desktop CPUs offer.

Not that I can predict the future, but better tooling means 
smarter tools, smarter tools require another level of power. And 
judging from what is happening in language research I'd say that 
is the direction we'll see in the next few decades. But who 
knows, maybe the next gen javascript will own the market for 
decades to come. Hard to tell.

What I do see is that neither Apple or Intel have done a lot of 
innovation in the past decade. Maybe they don't have to, maybe 
their margins are too large to care.

That opens the door for new players.