r/compsci • u/tranquilinho • 1d ago

Test of time

Hi all,

Hopefully not asking a silly question: which practical applications of CS would you highlight in the context of having passed the test of time?

This question came to my mind while talking with colleagues about the impact and longevity of TCP/IP (obviouslly with changes and improvements over time, but essentially TCP/IP still today)

In the case of programming languages, C and "LISP" come to my mind (even though nowadays they might not be so much in active use, their influence, for good or bad, can be felt everywhere)

Now that LLM is almost ubiquous in discussions, a candidate could also be Neural Networks.

I am curious also about failure stories - sometimes much more can be learned from a theory or application that proved wrong (against the initial promises)

Thanks!

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u/FragrantCondominium 1d ago

s now, SQL is basically undying at this point. the whole nosql wave tried to bury it and somehow it just keeps chugging along while mongo hype cycles come and go

failure wise the semantic web is a classic, tim berners-lee really thought we'd all be annotating our html with rdf triples and instead we got twitter

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u/currentscurrents 1d ago

The big problem with the semantic web was the labor-intensive manual tagging. You had to know in advance what abstractions over the data you cared about, and manually build those abstractions into a structured format. Other knowledge graph projects like Cyc had the same problem.

What we really needed was software that could automatically learn semantics from data, but we'd have to wait another couple decades for that.