Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 106 posts

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#41

Post by misterbwong »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #29

> Another productivity booster is Cross-Platform frameworks. I would be so, so happy to see a UI framework that runs (well) on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. My druthers would be for it to have bondings to a JVM language (Kotlin is my happy place these days), but I would be okay writing in any similarly productive language. Flutter is trying to get there, but it's not a viable solution on the desktop yet, and…

(Serious question) Isn't this what Java UI frameworks (swing/javafx/etc) are supposed to address? It's been a while since I've been in the JVM universe so I'm genuinely curious.

Also, what about Xamarin/C#? Going from Kotlin to C# should be pretty smooth and Xamarin is supposed to be pretty usable.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#42

Post by [deleted] »

collyw wrote: post #22
dacracot wrote: post #16

The cycle repeats over and over. Monolith becomes unmanageable and get chopped into loosely coupled, functionally independent replaceables: mainframes to containers, application servers to micro services, etc. Drag and drop coding hits the wall and gets overrun by old languages: 4GL to C++/Java, HyperCard to Objective C, etc. The monoliths are currently numerous in the single page application realm, choose your frame…

Scattered smaller components aren't really any more manageable. Its basically the same but with a load of network calls in the middle.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#43

Post by anichale »

yodon wrote: post #28

TypeScript revolutionized the act of writing JavaScript React and JSX revolutionized the act of writing HTML GraphQL revolutionized the act of connecting front end and back end But for CSS... SASS, SCSS, LESS, and such are by comparison pretty pedestrian tweaks on vanilla CSS

I think that CSS-in-JS is the new jam, especially if you're utilizing a state-driven UI view layer like React or Vue.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#44

Post by neolefty »

aantix wrote: post #8

Javascript performance on mobile continues to get better every year. For many of the informational based apps, it's totally overkill to create a native experience. One app, responsive views, and your small team is suddenly incredibly productive.

Disappearing middle layers:

The OP mentions "backendless applications", and using Javascript and the browser as your platform feels like the same kind of trend.

Sure, all those layers are still there — OS, TCP/IP, raster — but we've settled on a standard simplified foundation that's good enough and that everybody implements, whether it's Safari-iOS-touchscreen-ARM-LTE or Edge-Windows-mouse-x86-Ethernet.

"Static web applications" likewise — maybe instead of your own backend you call a few SAAS's that you've configured in a GUI rather than written code for. The point is you've reduced the number of layers you have to maintain, while still targeting a huge number of users.

In general, the trick is settling on a foundation. The web has evolved rather than being handed down from on high. What consensus will the next 5-10 years of evolution bring? Or will new platforms appear? Will Fuchsia show up and look a lot like the web?

Maybe the quality of that foundation can be measured by programmer productivity. A web standard that's consistent from device to device is a boon to the whole world. Thank you MDN for telling me what works, and where! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#45

Post by slimscsi »

enkiv2 wrote: post #7

Maybe the software industry will discover constraint programming the way that it discovered functional programming over the past decade. If it did, that would almost immediately increase programmer productivity for non-performance-critical tasks (since the compiler could supply the implementation), while making formal methods more easily applicable to production code & supplying the prerequisites for more clever auto…

These approaches did not fall out of favor because programmers were so much smarter, as you are implying. They fell out of favor because they were impractical at the time. Eaither because there was no language with critical odoption, the computers were not fast enough. The solutions had problems that the designers just assumed would be solved later, or the concepts did not survive their impact with reality.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#46

Post by crabl »

enkiv2 wrote: post #7

Maybe the software industry will discover constraint programming the way that it discovered functional programming over the past decade. If it did, that would almost immediately increase programmer productivity for non-performance-critical tasks (since the compiler could supply the implementation), while making formal methods more easily applicable to production code & supplying the prerequisites for more clever auto…

As someone who has used (and suffered at the hands of) NSLayoutConstraint, I'd actually love to see a more accessible and generally understandable version of this come into existence. Constraint programming is an underrated area of research at the moment, and I think it can be made so much more powerful by using what we've learned from building functional and declarative languages over the last decade.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#47

Post by vharuck »

huffmsa wrote: post #13
dhruvmittal wrote: post #4

- Context-aware IDEs with significantly more powerful versions of today's intellisense tools. - Compilers with even more powerful implicit behavior- forget automatically creating Get() and Set(), we'll be creating entire inheritance structures with one function definition.

Seconded and I'd even like to extend it to say that we'll be moving closer to automatically written code via machine learning. So we'll see a shift away from "developer specific boilerplate" in the same way libraries have abstracted a lot of basic setup boilerplate. You'll say "initialize a web service with these models" and the IDE will build out the majority of the project.

As long as the built parts are source code which follows human-readable formatting standards, so developers can fine-tune from the prototype, I agree.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#48

Post by kowdermeister »

enkiv2 wrote: post #7

Maybe the software industry will discover constraint programming the way that it discovered functional programming over the past decade. If it did, that would almost immediately increase programmer productivity for non-performance-critical tasks (since the compiler could supply the implementation), while making formal methods more easily applicable to production code & supplying the prerequisites for more clever auto…

> you should take a couple hours to read what software engineers thought was obvious prior to 1980

If you care about the subject this much and you think that everything was better before the 80s, then why don't you link to or name some sources you value?

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#49

Post by nkingsy »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #14

40 hour max work weeks enforced and 4 day work weeks. Shifts for people that need to monitor ops. Offices for everyone on staff that like to work in a quiet place and pubic areas for people who like to work in those places . Also, the minimization of time spent in meetings .

Was funny seeing the BBC article on "Office Space" yesterday talk about the switch to open offices without mentioning the backlash. Was sure HN would be up in arms.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#50

Post by CJefferson »

I think just finally getting rid of unsafe languages, particularly at the bottom. This will I think increase "productivity" of the world at large, by reducing the number of crashes and security holes they have to contend with every day.

I feel like we have finally arrived at the time when more people accept no-one (or at least, no-one outside a tiny set of people) should be using languages with undefined behaviour, or unsafe memory accesses by default (looking at you C and C++).

If "we" want to be taken seriously, and as more of the world relies on computing, we can't be building on a foundation of sand and saying "Oh, as well as every programmer is clever enough, all the time, we'll probably be OK".

Post reply on HN