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

If we look at the current programming languages & frameworks, there is a trend away from dynamically typed languages and monolithic high productivity frameworks like Rails. Considering new famous languages, Go, Rust, Kotlin, Swift, Nim & Crystal, main focus seems to be on static typing & AOT compilation to improve performance. There is a definite push towards adopting functional paradigm mixed with OO, which seems to be a push towards improving accuracy and parallelism. However, there is little groundbreaking in order to increase programmer productivity by a huge margin. (Not discounting the memory safety and other improvements, but they seem incremental.)

On the other side, there is a definite shift towards "backendless" applications, where frontend talks directly to the DB, either via autogenerated ReST or GraphQL APIs or via proprietary tools like Cloud Firestore. This is good for MVPs.

Frameworks like React & Angular give you decent building blocks to create SPAs, but the learning curve & effort required to create ambitious applications is very high.

There is a proliferation of "Low Code" frameworks which allow you to design drag & drop UIs & connect them with APIs. But, it feels like going back to "RAD" tools for the late 90s which led to a lot of spaghetti code. Also, some of these are prohibitively expensive.

One noteworthy change is UI design products which are trying to produce the code from UI Mockups. Relatively primitive at this stage. A breakthrough here can definitely be a big productivity booster.

Another productivity booster is Cross-Platform frameworks. It's already here, tried & tested. We know the trade-offs well. It requires a huge amount of effort to create & maintain a cross-platform framework. Big companies are already tackling this.

Considering this background, what do you think will be a breakthrough innovation in programming which will enable programmers to deliver ambitious web/mobile apps at a very high speed.

I will probably try out "Kite" soon.

AWS has lots of tools which have made me feel like a super developer. For example, using Lambdas and S3 to build massively parallel processing systems in just a few days.

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 automatic code generation methods.

(In general, software engineers becoming vaguely aware of tech invented in the 1960s and 1970s is a huge productivity boon. If you, as a developer, want to impress your peers, you should take a couple hours to read what software engineers thought was obvious prior to 1980, when software engineers had a strong background in software engineering.)

WebAssembly as the prevailing cross-platform VM and used as the main distribution mechanism for most applications.