2010 Predictions, 2009 Predictions Revisited

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Here we go again—another year, another set of predictions revisited and offered up
for the next 12 months. And maybe, if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll take that
shot I thought about last year and try predicting for the decade. Without further
ado, I'll go back and revisit, unedited, my predictions for 2009 ("THEN"),
and pontificate on those subjects for 2010 before adding any new material/topics.
Just for convenience, here's
a link back to last years' predictions.

Last year's predictions went something like this (complete with basketball-scoring):

• THEN: "Cloud" will become the next "ESB" or "SOA",
  in that it will be something that everybody will talk about, but few will understand
  and even fewer will do anything with. (Considering the widespread disparity in the
  definition of the term, this seems like a no-brainer.) NOW: Oh, yeah.
  Straight up. I get two points for this one. Does anyone have a working definition
  of "cloud" that applies to all of the major vendors' implementations? Ted,
  2; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in Scala will continue to rise, as will the number
  of detractors who point out that Scala is too hard to learn. NOW: Two
  points for this one, too. Not a hard one, mind you, but one of those "pass-and-shoot"
  jumpers from twelve feet out. James Strachan even tweeted about this earlier today,
  pointing out this comparison. As more Java developers who think of themselves as smart
  people try to pick up Scala and fail, the numbers of sour grapes responses like "Scala's
  too complex, and who needs that functional stuff anyway?" will continue to rise
  in 2010. Ted, 4; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in F# will continue to rise, as will the number of
  detractors who point out that F# is too hard to learn. (Hey, the two really are cousins,
  and the fortunes of one will serve as a pretty good indication of the fortunes of
  the other, and both really seem to be on the same arc right now.) NOW: Interestingly
  enough, I haven't heard as many F# detractors as Scala detractors, possibly because
  I think F# hasn't really reached the masses of .NET developers the way that Scala
  has managed to find its way in front of Java developers. I think that'll change mighty
  quickly in 2010, though, once VS 2010 hits the streets. Ted, 4; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Interest in all kinds of functional languages will
  continue to rise, and more than one person will take a hint from Bob "crazybob"
  Lee and liken functional programming to AOP, for good and for ill. People who took
  classes on Haskell in college will find themselves reaching for their old college
  textbooks again. NOW: Yep, I'm claiming two points on this one, if
  only because a bunch of Haskell books shipped this year, and they'll be the last to
  do so for about five years after this. (By the way, does anybody still remember aspects?)
  But I'm going the opposite way with this one now; yes, there's Haskell, and yes, there's
  Erlang, and yes, there's a lot of other functional languages out there, but who cares?
  They're hard to learn, they don't always translate well to other languages, and developers
  want languages that work on the platform they use on a daily basis, and that means
  F# and Scala or Clojure, or its simply not an option. Ted 6; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The iPhone is going to be hailed as "the enterprise
  development platform of the future", and companies will be rolling out apps to
  it. Look for Quicken iPhone edition, PowerPoint and/or Keynote iPhone edition, along
  with connectors to hook the iPhone up to a presentation device, and (I'll bet) a World
  of Warcraft iPhone client (legit or otherwise). iPhone is the new hotness in the mobile
  space, and people will flock to it madly. NOW: Two more points, but
  let's be honest—this was a fast-break layup, no work required on my part. Ted
  8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Oslo CTP will come out, and it will bear only a superficial
  resemblance to the one that came out in October at PDC. Betting on Oslo right now
  is a fools' bet, not because of any inherent weakness in the technology, but just
  because it's way too early in the cycle to be thinking about for anything vaguely
  resembling production code. NOW: If you've worked at all with Oslo,
  you might argue with me, but I'm still taking my two points. The two CTPs were pretty
  different in a number of ways. Ted 10; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The IronPython and IronRuby teams will find some serious versioning
  issues as they try to manage the DLR versioning story between themselves and the CLR
  as a whole. An initial hack will result, which will be codified into a standard practice
  when .NET 4.0 ships. Then the next release of IPy or IRb will have to try and slip
  around its restrictions in 2010/2011. By 2012, IPy and IRb will have to be shipping
  as part of Visual Studio just to put the releases back into lockstep with one another
  (and the rest of the .NET universe). NOW: Pressure is still building.
  Let's see what happens by the time VS 2010 ships, and then see what the IPy/IRb teams
  start to do to adjust to the versioning issues that arise. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The death of JSR-277 will spark an uprising among the two leading
  groups hoping to foist it off on the Java community--OSGi and Maven--while the rest
  of the Java world will breathe a huge sigh of relief and look to see what "modularity"
  means in Java 7. Some of the alpha geeks in Java will start using--if not building--JDK
  7 builds just to get a heads-up on its impact, and be quietly surprised and, I dare
  say, perhaps even pleased. NOW: Ah, Ted, you really should never
  underestimate the community's willingness to take a bad idea, strip all the goodness
  out of it, and then cycle it back into the mix as something completely different yet
  somehow just as dangerous and crazy. I give you Project Jigsaw. Ted 10; Wrongness
  2;
• THEN: The invokedynamic JSR will leapfrog in importance to the top
  of the list. NOW: The invokedynamic JSR begat interest in other languages
  on the JVM. The interest in other languages on the JVM begat the need to start thinking
  about how to support them in the Java libraries. The need to start thinking about
  supporting those languages begat a "Holy sh*t moment" somewhere inside Sun
  and led them to (re-)propose closures for JDK 7. And in local sports news, Ted notched
  up two more points on the scoreboard. Ted 12; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Windows 7 CTP will come out, and it will spawn huge
  media interest that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft promises, that will
  eventually be remembered as Microsoft guarantees, that will eventually be remembered
  as Microsoft FUD and "promising much, delivering little". Microsoft ain't
  always at fault for the inflated expectations people have--sometimes, yes, perhaps
  even a lot of times, but not always. NOW: And then, just when the
  game started to turn into a runaway, airballs started to fly. The Windows7 release
  shipped, and contrary to what I expected, the general response to it was pretty warm.
  Yes, there were a few issues that emerged, but overall the media liked it, the masses
  liked it, and Microsoft seemed to have dodged a bullet. Ted 12; Wrongness 5.
• THEN: Apple will begin to legally threaten the clone market again,
  except this time somebody's going to get the DOJ involved. (Yes, this is the iPhone/iTunes
  prediction from last year, carrying over. I still expect this to happen.) NOW: What
  clones? The only people trying to clone Macs are those who are building Hackintosh
  machines, and Apple can't sue them so long as they're using licensed copies of Mac
  OS X (as far as I know). Which has never stopped them from trying, mind you, and I
  still think Steve has some part of his brain whispering to him at night, calculating
  all the hardware sales lost to Hackintosh netbooks out there. But in any event, that's
  another shot missed. Ted 12; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Alpha-geek developers will start creating their own languages
  (even if they're obscure or bizarre ones like Shakespeare or Ook#) just to have that
  listed on their resume as the DSL/custom language buzz continues to build. NOW: I
  give you Ioke. If I'd extended this to include outdated CPU interpreters, I'd have
  made that three-pointer from half-court instead of just the top of the key. Ted
  14; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Roy Fielding will officially disown most of the "REST"ful
  authors and software packages available. Nobody will care--or worse, somebody looking
  to make a name for themselves will proclaim that Roy "doesn't really understand
  REST". And they'll be right--Roy doesn't understand what they consider
  to be REST, and the fact that he created the term will be of no importance anymore.
  Being "REST"ful will equate to "I did it myself!", complete with
  expectations of a gold star and a lollipop. NOW: Does anybody in
  the REST community care what Roy Fielding wrote way back when? I keep seeing "REST"ful
  systems that seem to have designers who've never heard of Roy, or his thesis. Roy
  hasn't officially disowned them, but damn if he doesn't seem close to it. Still....
  No points. Ted 14; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The Parrot guys will make at least one more minor point release.
  Nobody will notice or care, except for a few doggedly stubborn Perl hackers. They
  will find themselves having nightmares of previous lives carrying around OS/2 books
  and Amiga paraphernalia. Perl 6 will celebrate it's seventh... or is it eighth?...
  anniversary of being announced, and nobody will notice. NOW: Does
  anybody still follow Perl 6 development? Has the spec even been written yet? Google
  on "Perl 6 release", and you get varying reports: "It'll ship 'when
  it's ready'", "There are no such dates because this isn't a commericially-backed
  effort", and "Spring 2010". Swish—nothin' but net. Ted 16; Wrongness
  9.
• THEN: The debate around "Scrum Certification" will rise
  to a fever pitch as short-sighted money-tight companies start looking for reasons
  to cut costs and either buy into agile at a superficial level and watch it fail, or
  start looking to cut the agilists from their company in order to replace them with
  cheaper labor. NOW: Agile has become another adjective meaning "best
  practices", and as such, has essentially lost its meaning. Just ask Scott Bellware. Ted
  18; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: Adobe will continue to make Flex and AIR look more like C#
  and the CLR even as Microsoft tries to make Silverlight look more like Flash and AIR.
  Web designers will now get to experience the same fun that back-end web developers
  have enjoyed for near-on a decade, as shops begin to artificially partition themselves
  up as either "Flash" shops or "Silverlight" shops. NOW: Not
  sure how to score this one—I haven't seen the explicit partitioning happen yet, but
  the two environments definitely still seem to be looking to start tromping on each
  others' turf, particularly when we look at the rapid releases coming from the Silverlight
  team. Ted 16; Wrongness 11.
• THEN: Gartner will still come knocking, looking to hire me for outrageous
  sums of money to do nothing but blog and wax prophetic. NOW: Still
  no job offers. Damn. Ah, well. Ted 16; Wrongness 13.

A close game. Could've gone either way. *shrug* Ah, well. It was silly to try and
score it in basketball metaphor, anyway—that's the last time I watch ESPN before writing
this.

For 2010, I predict....

• ... I will offer 3- and 4-day training classes on F# and Scala, among other things. OK,
  that's not fair—yes, I have the materials, I just need to work out locations and times.
  Contact me if you're interested in a private class, by the way.
• ... I will publish two books, one on F# and one on Scala. OK, OK, another
  plug. Or, rather, more of a resolution. One will be the "Professional F#"
  I'm doing for Wiley/Wrox, the other isn't yet finalized. But it'll either be published
  through a publisher, or self-published, by JavaOne 2010.
• ... DSLs will either "succeed" this year, or begin the short slide into
  the dustbin of obscure programming ideas. Domain-specific language advocates
  have to put up some kind of strawman for developers to learn from and poke at, or
  the whole concept will just fade away. Martin's book will help, if it ships this year,
  but even that might not be enough to generate interest if it doesn't have some kind
  of large-scale applicability in it. Patterns and refactoring and enterprise containers
  all had a huge advantage in that developers could see pretty easily what the problem
  was they solved; DSLs haven't made that clear yet.
• ... functional languages will start to see a backlash. I hate to say it,
  but "getting" the functional mindset is hard, and there's precious few resources
  that are making it easy for mainstream (read: O-O) developers make that adjustment,
  far fewer than there was during the procedural-to-object shift. If the functional
  community doesn't want to become mainstream, then mainstream developers will find
  ways to take functional's most compelling gateway use-case (parallel/concurrent programming)
  and find a way to "git 'er done" in the traditional O-O approach, probably
  through software transactional memory, and functional languages like Haskell and Erlang
  will be relegated to the "What Might Have Been" of computer science history.
  Not sure what I mean? Try this: walk into a functional language forum, and ask what
  a monad is. Nobody yet has been able to produce an answer that doesn't involve math
  theory, or that does involve a practical domain-object-based example. In fact, nobody
  has really said why (or if) monads are even still useful. Or catamorphisms. Or any
  of the other dime-store words that the functional community likes to toss around.
• ... Visual Studio 2010 will ship on time, and be one of the buggiest and/or slowest
  releases in its history. I hate to make this prediction, because I really don't
  want to be right, but there's just so much happening in the Visual Studio refactoring
  effort that it makes me incredibly nervous. Widespread adoption of VS2010 will wait
  until SP1 at the earliest. In fact....
• ... Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 will ship within three months of the final product. Microsoft
  knows that people wait until SP 1 to think about upgrading, so they'll just plan for
  an eager SP 1 release, and hope that managers will be too hung over from the New Year
  (still) to notice that the necessary shakeout time hasn't happened.
• ... Apple will ship a tablet with multi-touch on it, and it will flop horribly. Not
  sure why I think this, but I just don't think the multi-touch paradigm that Apple
  has cooked up for the iPhone will carry over to a tablet/laptop device. That won't
  stop them from shipping it, and it won't stop Apple fan-boiz from buying it, but that's
  about where the interest will end.
• ... JDK 7 closures will be debated for a few weeks, then become a fait accompli
  as the Java community shrugs its collective shoulders. Frankly, I think the Java
  community has exhausted its interest in debating new language features for Java. Recent
  college grads and open-source groups with an axe to grind will continue to try and
  make an issue out of this, but I think the overall Java community just... doesn't...
  care. They just want to see JDK 7 ship someday.
• ... Scala either "pops" in 2010, or begins to fall apart. By "pops",
  I mean reaches a critical mass of developers interested in using it, enough to convince
  somebody to create a company around it, a la G2One.
• ... Oracle is going to make a serious "cloud" play, probably by offering
  an Oracle-hosted version of Azure or AppEngine. Oracle loves the enterprise space
  too much, and derives too much money from it, to not at least appear to have some
  kind of offering here. Now that they own Java, they'll marry it up against OpenSolaris,
  the Oracle database, and throw the whole thing into a series of server centers all
  over the continent, and call it "Oracle 12c" (c for Cloud, of course) or
  something.
• ... Spring development will slow to a crawl and start to take a left turn toward
  cloud ideas. VMWare bought SpringSource for a reason, and I believe it's entirely
  centered around VMWare's movement into the cloud space—they want to be more than "just"
  a virtualization tool. Spring + Groovy makes a compelling development stack, particularly
  if VMWare does some interesting hooks-n-hacks to make Spring a virtualization environment
  in its own right somehow. But from a practical perspective, any community-driven development
  against Spring is all but basically dead. The source may be downloadable later, like
  the VMWare Player code is, but making contributions back? Fuhgeddabowdit.
• ... the explosion of e-book readers brings the Kindle 2009 edition way down to
  size. The era of the e-book reader is here, and honestly, while I'm glad I have
  a Kindle, I'm expecting that I'll be dusting it off a shelf in a few years. Kinda
  like I do with my iPods from a few years ago.
• ... "social networking" becomes the "Web 2.0" of 2010. In
  other words, using the term will basically identify you as a tech wannabe and clearly
  out of touch with the bleeding edge.
• ... Facebook becomes a developer platform requirement. I don't pretend to
  know anything about Facebook—I'm not even on it, which amazes my family to no end—but
  clearly Facebook is one of those mechanisms by which people reach each other, and
  before long, it'll start showing up as a developer requirement for companies looking
  to hire. If you're looking to build out your resume to make yourself attractive to
  companies in 2010, mad Facebook skillz might not be a bad investment.
• ... Nintendo releases an open SDK for building games for its next-gen DS-based
  device. With the spectacular success of games on the iPhone, Nintendo clearly
  must see that they're missing a huge opportunity every day developers can't write
  games for the Nintendo DS that are easily downloadable to the device for playing.
  Nintendo is not stupid—if they don't open up the SDK and promote "casual"
  games like those on the iPhone and those that can now be downloaded to the Zune or
  the XBox, they risk being marginalized out of existence.

And for the next decade, I predict....

• ... colleges and unversities will begin issuing e-book reader devices to students. It's
  a helluvalot cheaper than issuing laptops or netbooks, and besides....
• ... netbooks and e-book readers will merge before the decade is out. Let's
  be honest—if the e-book reader could do email and browse the web, you have almost
  the perfect paperback-sized mobile device. As for the credit-card sized mobile device....
• ... mobile phones will all but disappear as they turn into what PDAs tried to
  be. "The iPhone makes calls? Really? You mean Voice-over-IP, right? No,
  wait, over cell signal? It can do that? Wow, there's really an app for everything,
  isn't there?"
• ... wireless formats will skyrocket in importance all around the office and home. Combine
  the iPhone's Bluetooth (or something similar yet lower-power-consuming) with an equally-capable
  (Bluetooth or otherwise) projector, and suddenly many executives can leave their netbook
  or laptop at home for a business presentation. Throw in the Whispersync-aware e-book
  reader/netbook-thing, and now most executives have absolutely zero reason to carry
  anything but their e-book/netbook and their phone/PDA. The day somebody figures out
  an easy way to combine Bluetooth with PayPal on the iPhone or Android phone, we will
  have more or less made pocket change irrelevant. And believe me, that day will happen
  before the end of the decade.
• ... either Android or Windows Mobile will gain some serious market share against
  the iPhone the day they figure out how to support an open and unrestricted AppStore-like
  app acquisition model. Let's be honest, the attraction of iTunes and AppStore
  is that I can see an "Oh, cool!" app on a buddy's iPhone, and have it on
  mine less than 30 seconds later. If Android or WinMo can figure out how to offer that
  same kind of experience without the draconian AppStore policies to go with it, they'll
  start making up lost ground on iPhone in a hurry.
• ... Apple becomes the DOJ target of the decade. Microsoft was it in the 2000's,
  and Apple's stunning rising success is going to put it squarely in the sights of monopolist
  accusations before long. Coupled with the unfortunate health distractions that Steve
  Jobs has to deal with, Apple's going to get hammered pretty hard by the end of the
  decade, but it will have mastered enough market share and mindshare to weather it
  as Microsoft has.
• ... Google becomes the next Microsoft. It won't be anything the founders
  do, but Google will do "something evil", and it will be loudly and screechingly
  pointed out by all of Google's corporate opponents, and the star will have fallen.
• ... Microsoft finds its way again. Microsoft, as a company, has lost its
  way. This is a company that's not used to losing, and like Bill Belichick's Patriots,
  they will find ways to adapt and adjust to the changed circumstances of their position
  to find a way to win again. What that'll be, I have no idea, but historically, the
  last decade notwithstanding, betting against Microsoft has historically been a bad
  idea. My gut tells me they'll figure something new to get that mojo back.
• ... a politician will make himself or herself famous by standing up to the TSA. The
  scene will play out like this: during a Congressional hearing on airline security,
  after some nut/terrorist tries to blow up another plane through nitroglycerine-soaked
  underwear, the TSA director will suggest all passengers should fly naked in order
  to preserve safety, the congressman/woman will stare open-mouthed at this suggestion,
  proclaim, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and immediately get a standing
  ovation and never have to worry about re-election again. Folks, if we want to prevent
  any chance of loss of life from a terrorist act on an airplane, we have to prevent
  passengers from getting on them. Otherwise, just accept that it might happen, do a
  reasonable job of preventing it from happening, and let private insurance start offering
  flight insurance against the possibility to reassure the paranoid.

See you all next year.

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