Discussion on:

10 development technologies that refuse to die

A more and more larger companies become entrenched with using computers along with proprietary software, they can ill-afford the cost to totally replace that software with something new, Unless a company's business model radically changes, what is the inducement to spend the large amount of money for new software to do the same thing? (As an aside for Windows-8...what is the inducement for companies to move to Windows-8 when XP and Windows-7 applications are serving them very well?)

Inducement would be lack of support, from Microsoft, for XP and no updated manufacturer drivers for new hardware or updated/supported applications for XP.

*XP is slated to be EoL April 2014 along with Office 2003.

Factor in ~8 months to test all your applications and hardware and another ~2 years for deployment, depending on your target audience, and crunch time is now.

The only reason to "upgrade" is: you're forced to do so by the wholesale abandonment of it by supporting vendors who want you to buy something "new" that isn't really. Right?

Even if Microsoft is fool enough to abandon a portion so big of business users hoping to sell more W7/W8 packages, I predict a host of third party vendors happy to offer support for a fee after April 2014.

1. Third party support providers aren't much of a solution. MS Windows is closed source software, which prevents third party support providers from doing a very complete job. If Microsoft ceases providing patches to the OS for security or to support new technologies, it can kill the old OS version.

2. People who are still using XP aren't really proving to be much of an ongoing source of revenue, because they aren't buying new OS licenses. Trying to sell more Win7 and Win8 licenses is basically how they would make money off those people. Many people who would otherwise stick to XP will instead upgrade; those that wouldn't will surely be regarded as lost revenue anyway, so no great loss.

3. It costs money to support an OS release. It costs more to support two. It costs even more to support three. When Win8 hits, if XP is still supported, that means Microsoft is supporting *four* of them (XP, Vista, Win7, Win8) -- and that doesn't even take into account server and mobile OS offerings.

I don't think Microsoft would be foolish enough to *not* abandon XP before too much longer. Of course, with a change in business model, this entire problem could go away, but I believe that Microsoft *is* foolish enough (especially with Ballmer at the helm) to refuse to consider such a fundamental change in business strategy. Rather than look to the future and maximize earning potential in the long run, Microsoft will look to the past and cling to what it already has until its final death rattle, if Ballmer has anything to say about it. Company leadership can't really imagine doing anything else, and Microsoft as a whole seems to think that a combination of market monopolist strongarm tactics with appeals to government interference in the industry can keep the world from changing.

I talked with some friends recently who work on in-house IT development, and they were sure MS was not going to drop the desktop model for a long time. They knew about W8. They said they still use XP. Though what I've heard from Justin James is that XP users have been a minority in the market for a few years now. So it's conceivable MS could force an upgrade in the near future.

Another wrinkle is the video games situation on Windows. I talked to another friend earlier this year who is a professional video game developer. He said something about how all of Microsoft's own video games for the PC only work on XP. I think he even said most of the PC games that are out now, from other vendors, still only work on XP. As an example, he brought up "Tron Evolution," a game that was released just a couple years ago, on XP. I brought up that I'd heard several years ago about how MS tried to incentivize people to upgrade by releasing some games that only worked on Vista. He said he knew about that, but it turned out most of the features of the games worked on XP. There were just a few small things they added, barely noticeable, that only worked on the newer version of Direct X. Once hackers patched the games, they worked on XP just fine, and there was no real noticeable difference. He said it was a sham. This made me wonder WTF is going on with MS. They've gone from XP, to Vista, to W7, and now to W8, while their video game division is now 2 versions, and soon might be 3 versions behind! If they're going to ditch XP, they're going to have to either get their games division to upgrade their skills to the newer API, or they're going to have to kill it.

Just a thought, but if the argument were made now that MS should be broken up into separate companies, I think there would be more acceptance of that idea among MS developers than there was 11-12 years ago, when that was an issue on the table. Maybe that was what you were alluding to when you talked about an alternative business model that MS wouldn't consider?

I had no idea things were so backwards and stupid in Microsoft, in the realm of interdivision cooperation. It really does sound like time to break up the company (actually, it sounds like about fifteen years past time to break up the company for maximum positive effect). I'm not saying so because of "antitrust" issues, though I do think Microsoft is an egregious offender in that area; I'm saying it because the overall effect to everyone involved would, on the whole, be better. The post-cytokinetic companies would probably produce better technical results and better average financial success, cripple the market less than a domineering monopolist organization does now, and be less susceptible to a slow decay under "leadership" by a bunch of fossilized bureaucrats whose only real strategy for guiding a market giant is to fly into murderous rages at anything that threatens actual change (including progress).

Breaking up the company definitely would be a great way to help shake up the business model at Microsoft, and if not for enabling, pathological aspects of corporate law I believe that Microsoft would never have gotten this big and ponderous as a single, monolithic organization in the first place. There are a lot of other things that should go into a re-envisioning of Microsoft's business strategy than that, though, such as actual revenue stream development models, approaches to targeting customer needs, process for sourcing development direction ideas, and so on.

A lot of Microsoft's orthodoxy is based on unwarranted assumptions, such as the belief that bigger is better, that the best way to remain king of the hill is to attack anyone who approaches the base of the hill, that the biggest profits come from spending as little as possible to produce the most minimally enticing new software then kill support for the old stuff in an artificial obsolescence scheme, that selling units is the best way to make money on software, that expensive DRM development and legal enforcement efforts result in improved revenues because the customer base is essentially inelastic while purchasing power is flexible, and everything would be chaos if it didn't follow a byzantine bureaucratic process where the guys on top of the pyramid should make all the important decisions with no meaningful input from the bottom (or from the distributed customer base at large, which Microsoft considers beneath the pyramid's foundation).

That's certainly how things look to me.

Anyway . . . much of the benefit to the various divisions of Microsoft in breaking up the company would be in breaking the bureaucratic logjam and shaking up business model orthodoxy, allowing some room to breath for some of these other possibilities for how to do things.

As for the desktop . . . we still need someone addressing the rich client platform. Facile claims from some quarters to the effect that the rich client platform is dead and Microsoft should go into the Internet business are short-sighted and overly simplistic.

Why do you put technologies like C/SQL/Java on this list? I enjoy most of the articles, but this one is plain stupid.

Far from being legacy dinosaurs, all three of these are still wildly popular because they are, quite simply, the best at what they do.

Then put COBOL on this list as well, ??ause it's the best language for processing batches of large amounts of business data.

The article says: "...that refuse to die" Not only is it good for a particular function, but there are people like you that keep it alive. Which is perfectly fine. But the article is trying to point out that there are technologies that should, by now, be replaced. I disagree with the article because if the technology can evolve with the changes then it is perfectly fine to leverage its strength in its new functions.

I'm having a difficult time figuring out what it is that you think is the thing Java does better than anything else. Maybe it's marketing, or bureaucracy, or entangling companies that use it in lawsuits. I agree that it's an odd choice to include in this list, at least without a better explanation for including it than what is provided in the article, but I don't think hosannas to the wonders of Java's unspecified wonders are really very meaningful or reasonable.

What does java do best? Write it once. Compile it once. Distribute to Android, Windows, *nix, or Mac. Same executable runs on x86, x86x64, MIPS, and ARM.

I'm sitting here and thinking about Chrome OS. The browser is the o/s. Great for web-apps, but what about local stuff? Maybe the answer is to include a TomCat with it. http://localhost:8080/my-local-app.jsp. What's the CPU behind it? Who cares.

You could do the same with PHP, but PHP doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, have the equivalent of a WAR file. The WAR would allow localized web apps to be a commercial production. And Java makes it easy.

QUOTE: What does java do best? Write it once. Compile it once. Distribute to Android, Windows, *nix, or Mac. Same executable runs on x86, x86x64, MIPS, and ARM.

Objective Caml, Ruby, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, Forth, some Lisp implementations, Tcl, ActionScript, Eiffel and Erlang, MATLAB, Lua, and nominally C#, among many other languages, all run in similarly portable runtimes that execute code in an intermediate state of compilation (bytecode much like Java's, in most cases). In addition to that uncomfortable (for many Java partisans) fact, many of these languages' runtimes are more easily installed across a wide range of platforms.

QUOTE: Maybe the answer is to include a TomCat with it.

That's a terrible idea. Following that line of thought, we might as well install everything on every computer. Everything.

Server side, yes, from what I've heard from Java developers, it runs on any platform with a JVM. Client side (with a GUI), again what I've heard from Java developers, hasn't been so lucky. That's been plagued for years by sluggish performance, apps. that break when you switch platforms, and ever changing API specifications. It has not been a pretty picture.

PHP is embedded in HTML documents, so no, we probably wouldn't even have "PHP with no rich media" without HTML.

There are better ways to get "rich media" than Flash, though, and as far as I'm concerned Flash can die in a fire. While we're at it, PHP can jump into the bonfire as well, and leave us with some better programming languages for the Web.

I dunno. Maybe Justin James was making an oblique reference to XHTML, which was a better direction for Web markup to go than a new version of HTML, but for some reason people decided to invent HTML5 and now we're stuck with it.

Not everything on this list is there because it's 'legacy'. Read the descriptions carefully and the reasons for their presence (from the author's point of view) should become apparent.

I don't agree with everything he's written here but I do see his point of view and regardless of my disagreements found the article entertaining.

I guess devs working with the languages written would take offence easier (because just like everyone else, Devs can get stuck in their ways, too) but unless you are a narrow-minded sort or a Dev whose skill-set was recently developed into these languages I don't see anything here that would make you go 'stoopid artikkal!'

Give the man a break and go and write your own list. hell, post your alternative list here as a response and I'm sure it'd be well received.

......that would earn me a minus. Sort of helps to prove my point. Did the chap who -1'd me come from a Dev background using one of these languages, I wonder?

I still say if you are upset by the list the author writes, post your alternatives here. I'd certainly love to see them.

I think the gigantic bucket of upvotes for a basically contentless comment calling the article "stupid" is a pretty good indicator of how the community at TR is getting overrun these days by a bunch of people who have no appreciation for meaningful discussion. As such, it is zero surprise to me that you got a downvote for a thoughtful comment about the article's intent and a suggestion that people contribute thought provoking content and treat people as human beings. I've seen similar events in other discussion threads recently, where about the least meaningful, most utterly contentless sour-grapes comment in a discussion has an order of magnitude more upvotes than anything else in the discussion. It makes me wonder whether a shift in the community membership of TR is reaching some kind of critical mass of people who aren't interested in thought-provoking content, and just want flame bait or (quite the opposite) confirmations of their biases.

People nowadays, no matter what area of expertise, dont want anything smart, thought prokoking, or "good" in nature. People love contraversy, gossip, rumor-mongering. All you have to do is watch you local news to see this. Unfortunatly, this "disease" is starting to spill over into other forms of media. Plus, there is no way to stop this. I great way to be noticed it to cause contrayversy. Say anything bad about google, apple, or internet security and you will see how the comments areas get flooded with idiots trying to prove how smart they are by arguing with people they have never met. This truly is the "end of days" and I welcome it.

I would vote yes for both you and dl_wraith but the old Navy Browser I am using will not permit it. Regarding controversy all you have to do is look at congress, to see the cost of embracing controversy rather than content.

Thank you all. I thought I was heading for deleted comment city right there. Shows you what I know. Guess denizens of T'interweb can still surprise me.

Thanks for making me smile

The article is not "10 development technologies that should die." It is "10 development technologies that refuse to die." It is about long used technologies that we are so dependent on, that it'll take a very long time to switch to something better (once it comes along). Java, for instance, is not a high performing technology (resource hog), but there isn't a great alternative.

Why should C/SQL/.. should even be considered to "refuse to die"? So many technologies depend on them that makes the idea ridiculous.

The mention of C was pretty clearly positioned as being about application development, as opposed to system programming and compiler development. The fact a lot of technologies depend on system programming and compiler development is beside the point.

As for SQL . . . it is beset on all sides by people who (rightly) gripe about its flaws, and there are competing technologies intended to replace it, but none of them really fill the void SQL would leave. That could be seen as a perfectly reasonable take on a technology that "refuses to die", because there's so much desire to kill it.

Java's a little harder to swallow as something included in this list. I disagree that "there isn't a great alternative", at least in purely technical terms, but there aren't any credible efforts to replace the JVM across the board (.NET is very platform-specific, on a platform where the JVM never gained the same traction it has elsewhere).

It is about long used technologies that we are so dependent on, that it'll take a very long time to switch to something better (once it comes along).

This really doesn't make a lot of sense, how can dev tech "die" if there is nothing to replace it. I might agree if there were alternatives for some of these, but since there aren't then saying that they "refuse to die" is ridiculous since they cannot die unless/until there is an alternative.

If an environment dies, the critter dependent on that environment dies. That is the source of a lot of the extinction of species in the world; loss of the environment that sustained a species, rather than replacement by a competing species.

The same can apply to development technologies. While some languages would make the jump, for instance, if Oracle had won its case against Google and gone on to win further Pyrrhic "victories" in the courts against other people using Java technologies, it might have succeeded in killing the JVM platform, thus wiping out whole ecosystems of languages dependent on the JVM, even where there is no strict replacement for those languages elsewhere.

Perhaps sean.marmot is on to something. How about a one for one replacement suggestion or possibility for each of these technologies. Might not only be fun but informational.

As another commenter pointed out, it isn't a list of "legacy" stuff (though most on it are) or things that are well past their prime, but things that are so firmly entrenched they aren't going away any time soon, if ever in our lifetimes.

It is a badge of honor to be on this list, not an insult.

J.Ja

I've been in that category for years!

Funniest comment I've read in quite a while. Well played, sir!

The human race has long been on the "refuse to die" category. Is there no honor in that?

Couldn't agree more.

If I had to guess, I'd say they were included just because they've been around for a long time. While I agree it's kind of a strange list, with items in it that should require some convincing arguments for their inclusion -- but lack those arguments -- I also think that your comment is pretty nearly contentless and doesn't serve any particularly useful purpose here. All it seems to do is raise the temperature level of the discussion.

It says they refuse to die. It means they WON'T go away. How much simpler could that be?

And don't forget, Android apps are written in Java...

RPG has been around for decades and probably will stay for a very long time

The fax machine. This standard piece of completely outdated technology with its attendant protocol was predicted to die 2 decades ago, yet it persists. Although alternative technologies have been in place and in use during the last two decades, problems continue to trouble the alternatives while the venerable fax protocols continue to chug along, and chug along.

The one thing that could ultimately destroy the fax machine's hold on the world is fax software that doesn't suck. Nobody's rushing to write such software, though; the people writing fax software are (often intentionally) making it suck quite a lot.

I wouldn't call it *development* software, though.

At our office we have this copier that scans and sends you a pdf by email. It's like the killer app. Every single person understands it with no training. People scan dozens, maybe hundreds of documents per month. Once someone figures out you can "fax" someone by scanning then emailing, they reduce their use of the fax machine (saving money on the fax line). It doesn't eliminate the fax - because it's difficult to route faxes through mailboxes in a timely manner - but it transformed how people dealt with documents. Every office should invest in getting a copier that can email faxes to the office staff.

The killer app would be the one that eliminated all that paper your co-workers are scanning.

...my father was a regional sales manager with Moore Business Forms, one of the largest printing companies in the world when it came to forms. When computers began to become accessible and affordable to regular, everyday type companies, many in the business of selling forms wrung their hands and moaned that this would kill the industry. Dad just smiled and said really? Just watch your commission cheques. And guess which way they went? True, that type of business did pretty much dry up eventually because more and more could be done with the rapid developments associated with anything to do with computers. But it just seems that people in general have this 'need' to have paper involved in just about everything.
As time passes (and us older folks as well,) the attitudes will continue to change, as they already have. And eventually, that 'need' will pretty much almost disappear. But it will be time, and not an app, that'll make that happen.

I agree that the need for paper will continue to shrink, but we still have some die-hard generations who are used to paper and IBM typewriters.

The new generation may not invest in multi-drawer file cabinets at home, as we have done. Their little pads (or even smart phones) with a 64GB (or more) tiny SD card will be more than multi file cabinets in capacity. It is portable, without the weight and space, and available anywhere and everywhere.

With the computing revolution over the past decade or so, I can no longer predict what will be new in 2020, for example.

Who knows, in a few years, the current pads could become a thing of the past, and personally I have no doubt that they will be.
But what will replace them?
I don't exactly know, but I think integration would be the direction, where it would be a combination of all the needed computing, communications, photography, videography, multimedia, GPS, car remote control, home security remote control, garage opener, ..., etc. all in one small, light-weight, very high resolution unit.

A simpler alternative is to take a picture of the document with your cell phne and email it to yourself.then you can use online forms to upload the crap. Generally this is mostly used for expense reimbursements, medical claims, etc. the trick is to get a decent camera image on your cell..