I was up late on IM with a much-younger computer programmer and he asked “Damn, there’s a lot going on. Is it always like this?” Well, no, it hasn’t been. But in the future, it may be.

Near as I can tell, we’re simultaneously at inflection points in programming languages and databases and network programming and processor architectures and Web development and IT business models and desktop environments. Did I miss anything? What’s bigger news is that we might be inflection-point mode pretty steadily for the next few years.

Programming Languages · Up till not too damn long ago, for a big serious software project you could pick Java or .NET or, if you really liked pain, C++. Today you’d be nuts not to look seriously at PHP, Python, and Ruby. What’s the future mind-share of all these things? I have no idea, but that decision is being made collectively by the community right now.

By the way, on this subject, check out the Interview with the TIOBE guy; interesting stuff, even though I disagree with some.

Databases · CouchDB. SimpleDB. BigTable. Need I say more?

No, I don’t think relational databases are going away anytime soon. But I think that SQL’s brain-lock on the development community for the past couple of decades has been actively harmful, and I’m glad that it’s now OK to look at alternatives.

Will the non-relational alternatives carve out a piece of the market? I suspect so, but that decision is being made by the community, right now.

Network Programming · CORBA is dead. DCOM is dead. WS-* is coughing its way down the slope to dusty death. REST, they say, is the way to go. Which I believe, actually. Still, there’s not much yet in tooling or best practices or received wisdom or blue-suit consultants or the other apparatus of a mainstream technology.

So what are they going to be teaching the kids, a few years hence, the right way is to build an application across a network full of heterogeneous technology? That’s being worked out by the community, right now.

Processors · Moore’s law is still holding, but the processors get wider not faster. Now that the best and the brightest have spent a decade building and debugging threading frameworks in Java and .NET, it’s increasingly starting to look like threading is a bad idea; don’t go there. I’ve personally changed my formerly-pro-threading position on this 180º since joining Sun four years ago.

We still haven’t figured out the right way for ordinary people to program many-core processors; check out the inconclusive results of my Wide Finder project last year. (By the way, I’ve now got an Internet-facing T2000 all of my own and will be re-launching Wide Finder as soon as I get some data staged on it; come one, come all).

And I can’t even repeat my crack about the right answer being worked out right now, because I’m not actually sure that anyone has a grip on it just yet. But we’re sure enough at an inflection point.

Web Development · Used to be, it was Java EE or Perl or ASP.NET. Now all of a sudden it’s PHP and then Rails and a bunch of other frameworks bubbling up over the horizon; not a month goes buy that I don’t see a bit of buzz over something that includes the term “Rails-like”.

It seems obvious to me that pretty soon there’s going to be a Rails++ that combines the good ideas from RoR with some others that will be obvious once we see them.

Also, that some of those “Rails-like” frameworks, even if they’re not a huge step forward, will get some real market share because they’ll have some combination of of minor advantages.

Once again, I can’t say it’s being worked out right now, because for right now I see a pretty uniform picture of Rails’ market share advancing steadily. It won’t last.

Business Models · Servers, they’re easy to understand. Blue-suited salesmen sell them to CIOs a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth at a time, they get loaded into data centers where they suck up too much power and HVAC.

Well, unless you’re gonna do your storage and compute and load-balancing and so on out in the cloud. Are you? The CIOs and data-center guys are wrestling this problem to the ground right now.

And as for software, used to be you shipped binaries on magnetic media and charged ’em a right-to-use license. Nope, nowadays it’s open-source and they download it for free and you charge them a support contract. Nope, that was last century; maybe the software’s all going to be out there in the cloud and you never download anything, just pay to use what’s there.

Personally, I don’t think any of those models are actually going to go away. But which works best where? The market’s working that out, right now.

Desktops · As I wrote a couple of months ago: how long can the public and private sector IT management continue to go on ignoring the fact that in OS X and Ubuntu, there are not one but two alternatives to the Windows desktop that are more reliable, more secure, more efficient, and cheaper? More or less everybody now has a friend or relative that’s on Mac or Linux and is going to be wondering why their desktop can’t be that slick.

What’s going to happen? I don’t know, but it’s going to be dramatic once we get to the tipping point, and I think we’re approaching it right now.

Will It Always Be Like This? · You know, just maybe. Our mastery of the IT technologies is still in its brawny youth, with lots of low-hanging fruit to be snatched and big advances to be made. And these days, with the advent of blogs and unconferences and all those new communication channels, our thought leaders are busy chattering at each other about all these problems all the time, 24/7/365. The gap between the leading edge and technology that’s actually deployed in the enterprise is as wide as it’s ever been and to me, that feels like a recipe for permanent disruption. Cowabunga!