On Friday, 3 November 2017 at 14:29:27 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
You want to be able to compile D programs that go on a smart phone because that's where the growth of computer users is coming from.
That's not all that obvious. I think a lot of the adults who got computers in the mid 90s did so to be able to access WWW, and that this segment will be ok with tablets or just phones. And mostly web-apps in addition to banking/tickets and social apps. I think the majority of this not-so-sophisticated segment is quite limited in where they go after the novelty of mobile apps is weaning.
In addition you have the kids/teens/young adults market that used to be C64, Nintendo, Sega, Playstation etc. I think that market segment is somewhat stable in what they go for, but will be swayed by the latest fashion/marketing. So, it is increasing because third world countries get access, but same behaviour in some ways. And as such could move to a completely new platform quite quickly because kids have a very low threshold for moving to new tech.
Thus, it's good to be able to compile programs for that platform, but it doesn't mean that work done to improve the experience of programmers on other platforms is a waste of time.
Well, it is possible that web development will move to less demanding platforms, but is also quite obvious that to get to next generation of programming languages with heavy duty static analysis and software synthesis you need a magnitude more power than current desktop CPUs offer.
Not that I can predict the future, but better tooling means smarter tools, smarter tools require another level of power. And judging from what is happening in language research I'd say that is the direction we'll see in the next few decades. But who knows, maybe the next gen javascript will own the market for decades to come. Hard to tell.
What I do see is that neither Apple or Intel have done a lot of innovation in the past decade. Maybe they don't have to, maybe their margins are too large to care.
That opens the door for new players.
