Six Developer Predictions for 2022
What Will Change and How Will Techno-Savvy Innovators Define the Future?
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With a new year filled with twos, the following are my predictions for application developers for 2022.
Accelerated Go and Rust Adoption
Statically-linked languages like Go and Rust will continue to expand mindshare and usage, both as a response to their growing acceptance in the enterprise and their ability to contain their dependencies within a single binary executable file. This model not only provides easy deployment and maintenance but also facilitates containerization by reducing containers to their bare minimum runtime size.
Increase in Supply Chain Attacks
The ability for bad guys to query GitHub for popular, open source dependencies that haven’t been aggressively maintained will make such packages low-hanging fruit targets to exploit. This new wave will make Log4J look like a trial run. It will also coerce tech competitors to work together on a blockchain-style dependency validator and a new compensation scale for contributors that will both protect against supply chain attacks while rewarding key contributors for their generosity and commitment to software excellence.
Python Becomes the De Facto Machine Learning Language
From business analysts and physicists to grade school students and hobbyists, Python will remain the top interpreted computer language in the world. It will also attain the default status for machine learning projects that call upon the powerful Python-based libraries and toolsets leveraged to identify patterns and make decisions on those findings.
The Metaverse Gets Renamed
The overused, overhyped term of the augmented, virtual presence Internet connection gets a makeover. The current label will be relegated to the way “information superhighway” defined the Internet. Other less geeky terms like “extended presence” and “spatial networking” will be coined by marketing organizations that don’t want to sound dated.
Windows Waivers
As Microsoft slips into their old ways of dictating terms of customer engagement (such as bloating their Edge browser with garbage add-ons while preventing users from replacing it entirely with a web browser of their choice) disgruntled users will seek alternatives. With Apple still a pricey, premium alternative running on extreme proprietary hardware, Linux desktop adoption will expand as developers seek to express their software configuration freedom.
Innovation Thrives
A new paradigm is brewing, and it is not the metaverse or its AR/VR hardware equivalents. It will be a novel approach to a technology just below the horizon and will help define the digital experience in the next twenty years. While this secret will not be ready for a hockey stick trajectory, more buzz among the young, techno-savvy innovators will start tinkering with its possibilities, and some of those tinkerers will be the new generation of companies that will define the future.
😎 Thanks for reading. What do you think 2022 has in store for the tech world? Share your thoughts in the comments.
If you enjoyed this article, check out these articles from Mike Riley:
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