> Things like grid computing or formal methods of software engineering had a lot of resources behind them, but nobody was able to use the results. Instead, very different formats of these ideas are what took root: cloud computing and advanced type systems.
The clearest example of this dynamic is probably the "Fifth Generation Computing Systems" initiative, which was described as a "hoax" for a long time but managed to characterize quite closely the way computing would ultimately be done in the 2010s and will probably be done in the 2020s.
Though that particular initiative had some deeply weird focus on using Prolog-derived query languages for everything, which ultimely failed because that whole paradigm lacked compositionality and was not feasibly extensible to concurrent/parallel compute (which was obviously a big focus of FGCS). Functional programming has proven a lot more influential overall.
The clearest example of this dynamic is probably the "Fifth Generation Computing Systems" initiative, which was described as a "hoax" for a long time but managed to characterize quite closely the way computing would ultimately be done in the 2010s and will probably be done in the 2020s.
Though that particular initiative had some deeply weird focus on using Prolog-derived query languages for everything, which ultimely failed because that whole paradigm lacked compositionality and was not feasibly extensible to concurrent/parallel compute (which was obviously a big focus of FGCS). Functional programming has proven a lot more influential overall.