+Readings:
>Reflections:
The article “9 Predictions for the Future of Programming” by Peter Wayner on InfoWorld.com delves into some interesting technology trends. I highly enjoyed his comment that, in the future, smart phones will do everything except make phone calls. It does seem like nowadays, with all the other ways to communicate, speaking on the phone has lost the attraction it once had. It seems rude that it took so many years of work to be able to hear someone's voice from miles away over a telephone line, but now we don't care about that and would rather not talk verbally at all.
Prediction 1: The REST protocol will take over all of the IoT until something better comes along. Representational State Transfer (ReST) is an architectural style for designing networked applications that is able to share information over server ports. This seems like just another way we are going to be mapping our world in the future - if everything can deliver data to a larger database, then we are just working towards a more defined universe. Although I study computer science and I love the problem-solving aspect of it, I believe our species has become too dependent on technology and I worry about how much we will forget in the future.
Prediction 3: Video killing the HTML star? I don’t know about that. HTML needed an update anyway - hyperlinks and mass amounts of text are no longer what we want as a culture. People are very lazy when it comes to retrieving information, I think. Why spend an hour reading articles on what is going on in the world when a nice 5 minute news reel from BBC News can explain it all? The popularity of videos is not a bad thing, in my opinion - anything that creates a wider need for creative jobs shouldn’t be looked at as a bad development for our culture. Televisions and especially television channels are going to be a thing of the past in 20 years, I think. I don’t watch much television, but I don’t see it lasting very long - I would much rather hop on my laptop and search for videos I want to watch rather than have to click through television channels to find something I don’t want to watch anyway.
Prediction 5: This is continuation of what I was saying about the IoT changing the way the world around us is recorded and collected into databases. In the next few years, we will gather such an incredible amount of data about absolutely everything. From the patterns of traffic in our city to reviews on our Uber drivers - it is all going to be collected. I don’t like what Wayner said with regards to the police: “the police will have more data than ever about the people walking on the streets”. It seems that privacy will be a thing of the past. We won’t need any kind of “Big Brother” scare because Big Brother will be an out in the open for all to see: we will know that whatever we are doing, seeing, writing about, texting about, tweeting about, will be logged into the system. I suppose with the lack of privacy will come a kind of openness, an honesty. At least, in theory - if some people are guaranteed more privacy than the rest of us, then I am sure we will still have problems, but one can still hope!