History of web is rather curious. Especially considering the fact that all the time some zealot group is wanting to make web ”open”. Which translates into ”work only with our own system”. ”Open standards” are pushed forward to fight against ”proprietary implements”, which translates actually into ”trying to replace old defacto standard, by our own proprietary implementation, and try get people locked into it”.
Following these cycles is funny indeed. Especially when looking how people are all the time running after ”silver bullet” technology to replace old technology.
In the end where this lead:
Just good old tradition what software engineers do. When new generation of developers come into market (fresh from the some school, sometimes not even any school), first thing what they are doing is to state that things what old generation did were ”wrong”, and actually things must be done this way. Well, naturally this coincides with the fact that new generation tends to see only old generation stuff, they will never see stuff what was coming from ancestors of old generation.
What that then means? Like it has been stated somewhere, software engineers are doomed to re-invent the wheel over and over again, since they are never remembering history further into past than what is immediately before them. Thus they will forget all lessons learned, and start re-inventing things which were already invented (and generally tossed away by old generation, due to rule number one in previous chapter).
Based on that it’s easy to make predictions what will happen in software engineering in roughly 10 … 15 years (which roughly is the cycle of ”discard old and re-invent technology what actually existed before that old one”).
On good side, there will be always work for software engineers, since wheel is reinvented always again.
Predictions:
Year 2020, young software engineers will ”invent” relational DB, as miraclous new technology. 😀