Top Five Developer Predictions for 2023
What’s in Store for the Year Ahead?
Last month, I concluded the year with an article evaluating how many of my 2022 developer predictions came to pass. Since it’s a new year, it’s time for a new list of predictions to benchmark. So without further ado, here are my top five developer predictions for 2023.
Prediction 1: Legacy Projects Persist
Even though the NSA recommends enterprises move to memory-safe languages, the momentum to do so will be stymied by budget constraints, economic justifications, and minimal impact to businesses that decide the cost to transition outweighs the cost-of-business-operation interruption. Basically, businesses are doubling down on the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality.
While that mindset makes sense from a purely economical standpoint, it overlooks the business-impact cost when legacy applications inevitably succumb to nefarious exploits, third-party-library supply chain attacks, and unsupported OS and runtime scenarios. As such exploits and vulnerabilities percolate throughout the year, these legacy apps will continue to be patched slapdashery-style. The patches will make the code ever-harder to maintain as they increase in entropy and time erodes their original application cleanliness.
Prediction 2: Greenfield Projects Thrive
Accepting the reality that legacy projects will continue to live on, businesses will also conclude that using non-memory-safe languages is not going to fly in software-audited environments. The justification to use 20th century languages no longer protects against 21st century threats.
As such, new application projects will be written primarily in Java (or C# if it’s a Microsoft shop), while Rust and Go rapidly gain ground in enterprise deployments. Rust will replace C/C++ projects, and Go will continue to be used in anything related to cloud management and integration.
Prediction 3: Social Media Gets Recalibrated
Twitter and Facebook will survive, but their significance will evaporate as their social influence wanes. Mr. Musk will navigate Twitter toward an even more commercial venture, with an expanded series of services sold to companies and individuals alike.
However, the potential for serious social toxicity will remain on these services, making them less trustworthy — a byproduct of social experimentation gone haywire. Alternatives like Mastodon will sputter to disuse due to the cost and complexity of managing the servers. Other attempts to sway users away from Facebook or Twitter will fail as well.
Prediction 4: Smartphones Trend Downward
The era of the smartphone has peaked and new-release shipment volumes will continue to trend downward. Just as the PC peaked prior to the smartphone era, smartphones have peaked at the era of new end-user computing interfaces.
Eventually, UIs will move towards an optics-based overlay in the form of lightweight glasses or contacts, but that technology will take another twenty-plus years to perfect.
Prediction 5: AR Sees Sunlight; Still Not Ready to Sprout
Apple’s augmented reality (AR) glasses will get more buzz in 2023, but not enough to sway star developers to fully commit to the platform as the future of end-user computing interfaces. Early adopters in the virtual reality (VR) glasses space have been burned, and Meta is realizing they are too far ahead of the curve to corner a market that simply isn’t there. No one is going to be wearing bulky headsets for a forty-hour work week, no matter how impressive the visuals.
Additionally, the long-term impact of wearing these devices will receive greater scrutiny by the medical community as more people expose themselves to this unnatural interface for lengthy durations. AR will help alleviate the encapsulation problem that today’s VR headsets plunge its wearers into, but the infinite focal length problem will continue to strain the eyes beyond the degree that computer monitors pose to current users.
📢 So that’s my list for 2023. Let me know what you think, and feel free to add your own predictions in the comments!
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