Is Programming Less Exciting Today?

I kinda agree with the general spirit of this post, but I'll posit that there's a lot of stuff that's "old and new again." That is, things that were once new and shiny, that didn't catch on or really take off "big time" for whatever reason, but are waiting for that "second wind." Some things are just ahead of their times anyway.<p>That said, some of what excites me these days:<p>The new batch of programming languages that are coming out / came out recently: Clojure, Scala, Rust, Go, Fantom, Ceylon, etc.<p>Machine Learning, especially with the availability of a toolkit like Hadoop that prepackages scalable version of many popular algorithms.<p>Technologies for extracting knowledge (with rich semantics) from unstructured data (Apache UIMA, for example). And on a related note, things like Apache OpenNLP.<p>And I'm still fascinated with the general notion of a "Digital Nervous System" for organizations, where the IT systems are really analogous to the human autonomic nervous system. Bill Gates started hyping up that phrase back in the mid to late 90's (it existed before then, but Gates really got some buzz behind it), but nobody seems to have truly achieved that level of integration and sophistication to this day.<p>Semantic Web technologies are something I have a lot of interest in, and that still excite me as well.<p>I'm really intrigued by the possibilities of applying tools from Network Science and Social Network Analysis to different kinds of problems as well. It's not <i>strictly</i> programming related, but there's interesting stuff going on in the world of complex dynamic systems and studies of emergent behavior, that could have some impact on computing in days to come.<p>Business Intelligence, Data Mining, Multi-agent Systems, Grid Computing, Swarm Computing, Evolutionary Computation, Reconfigurable Computing, Genetic Programming, Biocomputing, and, hell, even good-old-fashioned AI stuff (logic programming, expert systems, etc) still excite me. I believe there's still progress to be made in all of these areas.<p>But, then again, I'm an old fart, so what do I know? Now <i>getoffamylawn</i> while I go play a MUD and surf Gopherspace.

<i>It all feels like we’ve been here before, with only the names having changed</i><p>They have, while there is no denying that there where significant improvements with the last total technology shift, we do have to accept that we throw everything out and start over again. I sometime wonder where we would be if a language like LISP had come to the forefront and inertia stayed behind it. When we start over on new stacks there is a great deal of reinventing the wheel. Not that that has not contributed to forward progress, but I cant help but imagine what if something like the JDK had been around for lisp back in the 70-80's and we kept on running with it, what if everyone standardized on it. All of the recycling would have been avoided and we would certainly be in a different place. Whether it would be ahead of what we have now is impossible to know, but what can be stated is that the move from the web to mobile was the same as from the PC to the web, which was the same as from the mainframe from to the PC. WE seem to keep reimplementing a lot of the same systems on the next platform. How many accounting systems have been implemented for the Mainframe -&#62; PC -&#62; web and now mobile. But yes it does seem that every generation and every new platform changes out the underlining tools and we set of to re-implement systems in those tools. Along the way we get novel things like Google and Facebook, but for a good deal of the industry it is just implementing the same systems on the next platform.

There's yet another set of examples from gaming e.g. <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/owhaz/dear_nimblebit_we_feel_your_pain/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/owhaz/dear_nimblebit...</a><p>Alan Kay claimed there's only three new things in computers since 1980 (though he couldn't remember what they were): <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/357813/help-me-remember-a-quote-from-alan-kay" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/357813/help-me-remember-a...</a> and when he asked for new things since 1980, the web seems to be the only one <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-in-computing-since-1980" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...</a><p>One fundamental change is that computing is a fully accepted consumer market. I hear ordinary folk using technical jargon at in cafes. It's in a hit sitcom (big bang theory). This means that anything new won't feel any more special than new toothpaste or washing powder technology. The future has become commonplace, like the grimy worn spaceships of star wars. So I guess we're "hipsters". But excitement over the new has always been fundamental to science and technology.<p>There's another view: If things seem boring, it's because <i>you</i> are boring. Invent something interesting.

There's a difference between "done before" and "done well."<p>Also, the increase in network and computation speeds and the reduction in size of components means that things that were merely doable in the past are now doable in more interesting and practical ways.

There's still a lot to be excited about. Here's just a few things that excite me:<p>* Programmers are building and financing viable products on their own.<p>* They're deploying to the cloud because it's cheaper and more approachable for the little guy.<p>* They have new distribution methods available to them via App Stores and don't have to rely on software salesmen.<p>* They can measure nearly everything their users do.<p>* They can work from anywhere on distributed teams and have a good shot at success while maintaining a healthy work/life balance.<p>In short, yes programming hasn't changed much, but the way software gets built is changing a lot. That's still very exciting.

I think this man is just burnt out.