August 24th, 2005, 8:13 am
DCFC, I agree that (IT) innovations usually have long cycles. But if you look into the "evolution of tools; from the fist-wedge to the computer"; the story of the development of higher level tools with lower level ones (hammer made by fist-wedge, .......Mathematica made of C/C++), you have periods with significant accelerations and emergig technologies.. Example: unexpectedly, the film industry drove the cumputer graphics and imaging technologies very fast (much faster, than CAD did).Will the IT industry be driven by "information and communication" or "computing"?I take my personal crystal ball:It will be computing. This will force, say, Google to transform its profile from a "search engine company" to an "application services company". If yes, they will provide powerful web-based (platform-inependent) development environments and extend their server farm dramatically (providing unprecedented computing power).My CB says, that the standard web technology will not change much.Consequently, one needs to integrate "engines" into web servers. This will require kind of "servelets" (containers of servelets) and "server pages". On the client side, you manipulate your engine from web browsers. This might involve some html and applet programming. Servelets, server pages and applets suggest Java.Having a huge farm of computers, you are forced to think of grid computing. Fine grain parallelization will be subject of the concrete computing environment, but programmers, will be responsible for coarse grain parallelization. Hopefully with powerful but simple (symbolic) constructs.Say, we have "ValuatePortfolio" as list of "ValuateInstrument" functions (and "Aggregators"). You might want to use "ParallelValuatePortfolio" instead. Not more. No programming of explicit configuration-dependent constructions, session management or result aggregators.Programming languages will probably take place at the back seat, programmig paradigms (logic/rulebased, datadriven, functional, object-oriented,..) will move to the front.My CB shows me hybrid programming (instead of Mathematica OR MatLab, C++ OR C# OR Java; you need ...AND....AND...) and in "application servers" reuse becomes much more important. In QF: the best information providers, the best calibrators, the best modellers, the best solvers, the best result interpreters and decision supporters will be selected (by Google?).....?my CB? I take the announcement of the 7th framework programm of the European Commission (research and development) >>section "Information Technologies" >> "Technology Pillars / Taks Forces" I find "ubiquitous computing", "grid computing", "simulation (of complex systems)", "learning by machines",...In five years?
Last edited by
exneratunrisk on August 23rd, 2005, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.