[daxfohl]

Perf is becoming more important than it had been. Rust is still around and growing. WASM is becoming mainstream. You see some people migrating away from things that require garbage collection. Edge is becoming real, with Cloudflare and Fastly doing edge functions/workers, and AWS having come out with outposts, local zones, and wavelength (deploy AWS VMs to Verizon 5G hubs).

AWS is still eating the world, Azure is doing well and growing faster in enterprise markets but devs still hate it, GCP seems mainly startup and ML loads and they have an ultimatum to become top 2 or bust by 2022.

Open source is a little under fire. AWS made a closed source MongoDB clone. I feel like things have moved a bit away from DIY toward settling on whatever the big three provide.

JS framework overload has settled down and it's pretty much React and Vue. NoSQL has too, there's still mostly the same players as in 2017 but I'm seeing far fewer new entrants. In general I'd say things have slowed down as a whole, and the level of innovation isn't what it was a couple years ago. Shiny new object fatigue has set in a bit and people just want to make things work.

Docker in production is very real (our team uses docker in production only, not dev), and k8s has the mindshare.

ML is still fairly hot, but various experts saying we're starting to hit a wall wrt ML capabilities, and others saying plow forward and see.

[SahAssar]

> WASM is becoming mainstream

Really? While I've heard of a lot of experiments and a few companies using it in production, I'd hardly call it "mainstream".

[daxfohl]

You're right. I work in the WASM field, so it probably seems more mainstream from my bubble. It would be more accurate to say it's stabilizing and has reached a point where various orgs are rallying around it as a real thing and starting to build stuff around it.

[ckdarby]

> I'd hardly call it "mainstream" Agree, coworkers tried to use this for a project, 10/10 not ready for prime time. Basic tooling is missing, how does one perf/profile within wasm itself? We got stuck with plenty of issues.

[benibela]

>Perf is becoming more important than it had been

My eyesight is becoming worse, but I read that as Perl

[FillardMillmore]

I like Perl, but it's had a bit of an identity crisis since Perl 6. I believe late last year, they renamed it to Raku as a 'solution' to this identity crisis. I still think Perl can get the job done in a lot of different circumstances and, despite the fact that it's not really used as widely for web tooling as it was in the late '90s, it's still an invaluable scripting tool for sysadmins still willing to dip their toes in and learn it. As others have noted, the 'shiny new toy' effect has made Perl less attractive, but I think Perl has unfairly gotten a bad rap, especially in regards to opinions of how 'ugly' the language is - I tend to think it's more elegant than ugly. And of course, any programming language can be ugly - all depends on how clever the programmer in question wants to be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raku_(programming_language)

[rotterdamdev]

Perl came as a reaction to the Unix tooling that was awk regex and all that jazz. It was designed to replace those tools and it did a good job at that. Times have changed, however, and perl no longer fills a function. We have python now, which surpasses perl in functionality.

[b2gills]

What functionality does Python have that Perl doesn't?

I'm legitimately asking because I'm pretty sure there is almost no functionality in Python that isn't in Perl.

In fact of the features I've read about that changed between Python 2 and 3, all of them remind me of a change in Perl. Except Perl didn't break old code in the process.

[bpodgursky]

> GCP seems mainly startup and ML loads

BigQuery is hot everywhere (I'd rank it as by far the most valuable GCP product). Tons of enterprises are AWS except for when they replicate their entire dataset from S3 to GCS so their BI teams can use BigQuery.

[ckdarby]

>Perf is becoming more important

Should look at BPF/eBPF. Mainly bcc & bpftrace packages that come with ~70 tools out of the box.