Quantum Parallels. What Quantum Software Can Learn From the 1950s Golden Era

The 1950s were the golden age of computing, and almost everything since has been a variation on what was settled then. The pattern ran like this. A machine nobody could afford to leave idle, and a compiler given away to sell it. Then a user group that wrote the teaching material the vendor did not, and a standard that arrived a decade late and quietly ended the lock-in. IBM ran that sequence with FORTRAN between 1957 and 1966, and it is running it again now. Qiskit is the de facto default, the go-to framework for building quantum circuits, running experiments, dealing with the underlying hardware and producing results. It has become the workhorse of the quantum industry and academia alike. You would have to be living under a rock not to have come across it, and for many people, it is the first interface to any quantum device at all. IBM played their hand very well. Qiskit became the gateway to their cloud quantum service, which was the first on the planet, so rewind the clock and there was no real alternative. Now there are competing services and multiple languages. Can Qiskit maintain its podium lead against newer upstarts, and…