The 520’th post

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

This is the 520’th post on this blog, which will be 10-years old tomorrow. Regular readers may have noticed an increase in the rate of posting over the last few months; at the start of this month I needed to write 10 posts to hit my one-post a week target (which has depleted the list of things I keep meaning to write about).

What has happened in the last 10-years?

I probably missed several major events hiding in plain sight, either because I am too close to them or blinkered.

What did not happen in the last 10 years?

  • No major new languages. These require major new hardware ecosystems; in the smartphone market Android used Java and iOS made use of existing languages. There were the usual selection of fashion/vanity driven wannabes, e.g., Julia, Rust, and Go. The R language started to get noticed, but it has been around since 1995, and Python looks set to eventually kill it off,
  • no accident killing 100+ people has been attributed to faults in software. Until this happens, software engineering has a dead bodies problem,
  • the creation of new software did not slow down from its break-neck speed,
  • in the first few years of this blog I used to make yearly predictions, which did not happen (most of the time).

Now I can relax for 9.5 years, before scurrying to complete 1,040 posts, i.e., the rate of posting will now resume its previous, more sedate, pace.