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by amadeuspagel 1056 days ago
The internet tends to lock things in. There were many languages dominant in history at some point or another, english will be the final one. There were many scripting languages, javascript will be the final one. Many networking protocols, TCP/IP the final one. Same for git. I think the only thing that might displace git is some environment for new programmers with its own version control system like glitch[1].

[1]: https://medium.com/glitch/reinventing-version-control-with-g...
2 comments
qsantos 1056 days ago
> There were many scripting languages, javascript will be the final one

If, by “scripting languages”, you mean “browser-native languages”, WebAssembly might become a serious contender as the lingua franca for the Web in the long term.

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p-e-w 1056 days ago
> The internet tends to lock things in.

More generally, a globally connected civilization locks things in, once they are sufficiently widespread.

Barring an apocalypse, our present is eternity. I'm always amused when I read science fiction that assumes in the future, Chinese will be the lingua franca, or that we'll have political offices modeled after Ancient Rome, or that there's a world government, or similar nonsense.

To paraphrase O'Brien from 1984: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a crony-capitalist, meme- and outrage-driven society that always seems on the brink of collapse but never actually does collapse – forever."

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sidpatil 1056 days ago
> More generally, a globally connected civilization locks things in, once they are sufficiently widespread.

This idea is known as the end of history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history

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