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

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21–30 of 106 posts

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

#21
Some other reinvented wheel that makes one thing 10x easier but takes five years to build up an infrastructure from scratch for everything else that real programs need (an infrastructure that was already present in whatever the new thing replaced). Let a bit more time pass to forget a few other things, rinse and repeat. In other words, no net productivity gains, just churn.

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

#22

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.

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

#24
As languages with more interesting type systems come along, more powerful IDE tooling will be possible (e.g. idris 2/blodwen code completion https://twitter.com/edwinbrady/status/1050528305743622147)

More hopefully, maybe new language developers will put more work into easier and easier FFIs? How often have you thought "I wish language X could catch on, but all the useful libraries are in language Y?"

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

#25
I think people will see that type safety and functional programming don’t impact productivity much in a business setting, and we’ll see a flight from these languages as examples of horrible legacy code reveal themselves to show that the problem is behavioral / sociological, and has nothing to do at all with enforcement on the code or compilation vs testing.

I also think more job candidates will reject interviews that waste time with unrealistic homework assignments, marathon on-site interviews, etc.

Finally, I think productivity losses and health issues related to open-plan offices will soar, but companies will continue to be disingenuous and act like it improves collaboration or saves money when it’s uncotroversially flat false.

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

#26
The gains from every developer having really good go-to-definition and find-references for all languages and code bases would be immense. The Language Server Protocol (LSP) from Microsoft has standardized a way for languages to provide these features, and more and more editor and language implementations are being built.

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

#27
> 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.

Any ambitious application is going to require a high learning curve and lots of effort. Otherwise it wouldn't be ambitious.

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

#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

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

#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 somehow doesn't even have a decent HTML widget. I do like Dart, however; it's similar enough to Kotlin/Swift that I'm comfortable writing it, even if I have to look up exact syntax now and then.

Electron wants to solve this problem, but we all know the arguments about its bloated runtime and egg-cooking power usage.

I suppose Progressive Web Apps and WebAssembly have the potential to solve this, too.

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

#30
The pendulum is now swinging back to types. Because it's a pendulum, in 5-10 years the next hot productivity thing is going to be dynamic, type-free languages.

I still remember when people were excited by the productivity gains from Ruby. "No time wasted wrestling with casts and typing".

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