Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Impossible 2512 days ago
OpenGL is more than 25 years old (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL) IrisGL predates it and is from the early 80s. Neural networks are from the early 40s and back probation is from the 70s. Graphics programming has changed radically in the last 20 years, increased compute and data has actually made neural networks effective for industry usage, etc so I get what you're saying, but in some ways it supports OPs original comment. A lot of stuff is advancing incrementally but there aren't as many radical new ideas in software, and in some ways many things are worse.
1 comments

Well I agree about the dates, but that's not really what I was getting at.

The number of working programmers using neural nets or OpenGL twenty-five years ago would have been vanishingly small. Today either one is completely common place.

Perhaps "revolutions" was laying it on a bit thick, but it does seem to me that software now faces different challenges than in 1994. Volume of data is different (even a moderately successful modern web app could easily receive more traffic than the entirety of the 1994 Internet). Hardware is more complex (accelerometers, multiple cameras, microphones, touch screens, compasses, widespread GPS). Security attack vectors are very different.

Again, maybe my opinion changes in 15 years, but it's hard for me to look at something like the 2019 linux kernel, and think "this is basically just more of the same."

Maybe we are all just making slightly different points about this topic...