How will you be programming in a decade? • Hacker News Board

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#41

Post by drawkbox » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 2:31 PM UTC

drewm1980 wrote: post #21

I could see visual programming becoming less of a domain-specific rarity, if some really good VR goggles hit the market. 2D visual programming hasn't really gone viral because complex graphs look like spaghetti when you project them down into a plane, but if they are floating in space I suspect that becomes less of a problem. Our brains evolved for taking in spatial information and manipulating 3D objects, after all.…

Unreal 4 has Blueprints that you can almost do everything in or write custom additions/components to [1].

Personally I am not a huge fan of visual as it almost seems more complex sometimes seeing more than you need to at a time. I prefer C++ directly in the engine but for working with teams where others such as technical artists, game designers, artists etc need to modify it helps. It also helps document the architecture of something without having to dig in as much. They have a pretty good balance of direct code and/or visual blueprints in Unreal. The best part is you can always get to the metal with the code behind it, or you can choose to do either visual or direct code only, or both visual and direct code. I think visual programming that obscures the source or makes ugly source is not great.

[1] https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Blueprints/i...

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#42

Post by hodwik » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 2:33 PM UTC

sitkack wrote: post #24

The premise that video editing is done primarily on dedicated hardware is incorrect. I know two video editors (people not things) that create trailers for block buster movies and they do it on a mac laptop using final cut. Software can be written anywhere now, most TVs costing over 800$ are running some form of android, many with access to the google play store. In 10 years, I will most likely be using a keyboard con…

> "I know two video editors (people not things) that create trailers for block buster movies and they do it on a mac laptop using final cut."

I find that hard to imagine. I'm running a pretty powerful desktop, and I was having a hard time just editing and grading RAWs in Resolve yesterday.

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#43

Post by dagw » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 2:34 PM UTC

Given how little has changed in the way I'm programming compared to a decade ago, I'm going to guess very little.

edit: what has changed is size of data sets I can work with and speed at which I can manipulate them. 10 years ago 300-500 GB of data was quite a lot of data, now it's something I trivially work with on a middle of road computer using normal software without really having to worry too much about performance. Loading 20-30 GB data sets into memory is something I just do without really thinking about it, as is visualizing them in 3D.

Basically everything is the same, it's just 10 times bigger and 10 times faster

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#44

Post by imtringued » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 2:36 PM UTC

noir_lord wrote: post #19

vidarh wrote: post #8

What I need to work is a reasonably large screen, a good keyboard, and a computer powerful enough to run a decent editor, browser and ssh connection from that machine to one or more machines running the rest of my stuff. In other words: I need a terminal. There's no need for me to have a beefy computer on my desk, because I can leave that under my stairs and not have to worry where I work on it from, and mix and matc…

Agreed. My main laptop is a 17" Vostro, it's an older i5 (2430 I think) with 8GB RAM, it's absolutely fine for all the development stuff I do on it, if I could get something of that speed with an awesome screen and keyboard for a decent price I'd be so happy. I keep looking at the Thinkpads coming on the market second hand but while they hit two out of three (similar spec, good keyboard) they are still all 1600x900 o…

I don't see a future in tablets. They removed the most important component for a programmer (keyboard). Sure you can get a bluetooth keyboard but then why didn't you get a laptop in the first place? If I'd remove something from a laptop it would be the screen and replace it with the hololens or some other holographic device.

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#45

Post by hodwik » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 2:39 PM UTC

toddan wrote: post #38

I probably wont be programming that much, if i do not work with a legacy system. The type of programming i do is mostly putting a simple gui on top of a database, in a decade we will have automated that task and making a database application will be as simpel as doing a powerpoint presentations. If i do not move up to management or find a niche i will be out of a job, because i do not have the capacity to figure out…

There will still be jobs for "configurers", who define the inter-field dependencies and so on, in support of the business logic. As it gets easier to make these forms the amount of logic in them will increase.

Your job will be to understand a business process, and build the app out so that the app supports the process.

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#46

Post by imtringued » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 2:58 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #40

Yet another thin client lover. I really expected them to get extinct be early 2000's, but looks like I was falling on the same kind of mental trap they do. Well, my phone is perfectly capable of compiling my software today, so why will I offload it to a server 10 years in the future? If your answer has any mention of "battery", please explain how using a wireless network to transmit the entire software twice will use…

A phone can do anything your desktop or laptop can do given sufficient memory. You didn't bring anything new to the table.

I don't even know why you would care about the energy consumption caused by wireless transfer except if your software doesn't need to be compiled because it's interpreted or your codebase is tiny. Also since you never talked about speed, compiling on a server can still be significantly faster than compiling on a phone.

By the way, why do you pretend to be a caveman? Can't you just think a little bit ahead? You don't send the entire software twice you only send the changes and assets don't have to be transferred back to your phone.

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#47

Post by nemmons » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 3:03 PM UTC

dracul104 wrote: post #29

pluma wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heard of developers today using the 2005 version of their IDE because they need to support widespread legacy systems that won't be updated to newer software for the foreseeable future (and modern versions of the IDE have become incompatible). Legacy is here to stay. There'll likely still be people hacking on COBOL in 2025.

At my last job, we were still supporting .NET 1.1 apps using Visual Studio 2003.

At my last job, we were still supporting .dlls written in VB6. Last I heard they had plans to upgrade them to .NET by Q2 2016.

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#48

Post by ZenoArrow » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 3:03 PM UTC

pluma wrote: post #15

onion2k wrote: post #12

Most of the grunt work of coding will be a matter writing a set of Cucumber tests (or whatever language you prefer, but it'll something close to formal English) and having a solver/fuzzer do the actual coding for you. There'll be some things that a solver can't do, but for the majority of simple things (generating models, CRUD operations, database interaction, networking, testing, maybe some aspects of the UI) I don'…

This would be more convincing if this hadn't been the predicted future for decades already, repeatedly labelling various "human readable" or AI based solutions the new messiah only to realize non-programs are not interested in learning to program and getting rid of the language doesn't change it. Human language is ambiguous. Ambiguity results in errors. We do not accept errors in machines because we expect them to ou…

> "This would be more convincing if this hadn't been the predicted future for decades already, repeatedly labelling various "human readable" or AI based solutions the new messiah only to realize non-programs are not interested in learning to program and getting rid of the language doesn't change it."

Non programmers do program a lot, they just don't recognise it as such. What are formulas in Excel if not programming?

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#49

Post by pluma » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 4:50 PM UTC

VLM wrote: post #39

pluma wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laptops and docking stations. And why shouldn't they replace desktops? Miniaturization is an almost universal trend in technology. The only place it doesn't work is screens, which is why we see a convergence in screen sizes between smartphones and tablets (although some devices are trying to replace the screen as a visual UI to varying degrees of success).

laptops also equal VPN access and work-from-home. Depending how cheap your employer is you may not get both a desktop and a laptop. I had no desktop from 00 to 05 so that some beancounter could get a bonus for not "wasting" a tiny fraction of our total salary on giving my team both a laptop and a desktop. I don't miss that place, but most of the world works under conditions like that. So desktops are for people who a…

I'd say you need to distinguish between "laptop" and "laptop with docking station" (or just lots of cables).

I mostly work on my laptop wherever I am -- in office, at a client, at home, on the commute, at user groups, etc. I'm comfortable with using my laptop's keyboard although I do enjoy having additional external screens when they are available.

But I know plenty of people (including non-developers at non-tech companies) who do most of their work at their desk with the laptop plugged into a docking station with external peripherals -- keyboard, mouse and screens -- and only use the laptop on its own for meetings or as part of a BYOD policy.

Desktops are non-portable. Laptops are portable. Tablets are ultra-portable but 1) not powerful enough on their own (good luck relying on a remote desktop with a dodgy Internet connection) and 2) not as comfortable to use for many professions (due to size constraints, even if you have a physical keyboard -- less so if you just need a dumb device to click through PowerPoint presentations).

Laptops are a compromise between a desktop and a tablet. Laptops with docking stations can replace most desktops (except for high performance scenarios -- but for reference my 15.4" laptop has 4 cores, 32 gigs of RAM and an nVidia graphics card; good enough for most things other than bleeding edge AAA gaming).

The benefit of a laptop with docking station over a desktop is portability. Desktops are only really required if you need levels of performance you absolutely can not gain with a laptop or that would make the laptop insufficiently portable (e.g. due to battery life -- I can generally get away with a meagre three hours away from wall outlets but many would prefer a longer battery life over the raw performance).

Re: How will you be programming in a decade?

#50

Post by pluma » Mon, Dec 07, 2015, 5:04 PM UTC

humanrebar wrote: post #18

pluma wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be more convincing if this hadn't been the predicted future for decades already, repeatedly labelling various "human readable" or AI based solutions the new messiah only to realize non-programs are not interested in learning to program and getting rid of the language doesn't change it. Human language is ambiguous. Ambiguity results in errors. We do not accept errors in machines because we expect them to ou…

> When you begin to formalize human language in such a way that it becomes unambiguous, you effectively just create a new programming language. Exactly. This is why professional jargon (a) exists. Pick a noun in computers and programming. It has another meaning in another context. This is why contracts are written in "legal English" (b) and not in normal English. a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon#Examples b) ht…

Legalese is not unambiguous. It is minimally ambiguous. Ambiguities can still derive from the way the (ideally completely unambiguous) terminology is used. In order to have a perfectly unambiguous legal document it would need to consist of a single well-defined phrase with a single well-defined context.

If legalese were as unambiguous as you seem to think it is, most case law could be fully automated to the point we'd barely ever need actual lawyers and courts.

The only perfect language is the language of mathematics (if we ignore conflicting notations and definitions often being relative to a specific -- though typically well-defined -- problem domain).

As soon as it involves the real world, things get messy and the wider the margin of error becomes. Physics and Chemistry tend to work relatively well (unless you try to accurately predict complex systems). Biology a bit less so. Psychology is where things start to fall apart. Sociology is where it completely breaks down.

But even legalese isn't as well-defined as mathematics. Simply because it has to refer to pre-existing concepts from the start or else it wouldn't be of any actual use (e.g. what's the point of defining "theft" without referring to any real-world interactions -- but once you involve real-world interactions you've left the rational objective domain and rely on the subjective experience of human observers).