Programming trend No. 4: Plantations everywhere
There's a dark side to these tightly integrated stacks of code: the walled garden.
The Internet began with the premise that there would be no gatekeepers. Every packet would be delivered to its destination, with our data free to wander. Alas, that promise is eroding, and not because the ISPs are increasingly turning to traffic shaping or deep packet inspection technologies.
These days, everyone seems to be retreating to walled gardens, where everything is safer and simpler. If you want to develop for the iPhone, you'll have to write code to Apple's vague specifications, then Apple -- and Apple alone -- will decide whether it will run on its machines. It's not up to you, the programmer, and it doesn't matter what the users say, either.
It's not just Apple. Creating games for Facebook means getting Facebook's permission to connect to Facebook users. It doesn't matter how many people click the Like button if Facebook decides to lock out your code. Microsoft, suddenly the most open and least restrictive of the big companies, is widely believed to be looking in awe at the success of these gardens and wondering why the Department of Justice treated Internet Explorer so differently. Only a naive programmer thinks that the other companies won't follow along.
There are deeper problems with walled gardens, beyond loss of control. Purveyors of walled gardens could very well keep the lion's share of the income derived from the work of independent developers. The revenues that trickle down to the programmers in the company town will be just enough to keep the server Ethernet lights flickering.
These walled gardens also threaten to balkanize the coding world into separate camps according to language. One look and you can see programmers moving from stubborn individualists in the open frontier to hired hands. Welcome to the new plantation.
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