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

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

#51

Post by maxxxxx »

crabl wrote: post #38
nikanj wrote: post #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".

Rather than a pendulum, I think the reality is that typed languages are now going through a significant period of evolution, especially with the advent of _gradual_ typing. TypeScript, for example, is just a superset of JavaScript, but with a compiler that's smart enough to infer many of the underlying types from context. The notion of rigorous, strong typing has always been marred by the concept of casting, but this…

Agreed. It seems typed languages are adding a lot of features that made dynamic languages interesting. You can see the same in databases where SQL engines are adding features from NoSQL.

Overall I feel there is much more language development going on now compared to may 2000-2010. I am not a big fan of JavaScript but I feel its rise has put pressure on other languages to keep up.

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

#53

Post by yodon »

anichale wrote: post #43
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.

Right, but with CSS-in-JS I'm still fundamentally dealing with all the complexity and subtleties of raw CSS, just with better access to variables and such. Bootstrap is a much more disruptive rethink of CSS (ditto flexbox), but they only disrupt a small portion of the CSS surface area.

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

#54

Post by max76 »

The line between programmer and dev ops will be moved with more responsibilities on the developer. Cloud services will continue to decrease the barrier of entry while entering a price war, and every team or individual will have a set budget inside the cloud. Integration with IDEs and improved online UI and CLI tools will make these tasks very easy for everyone. We can also expect better/easier/cheaper support infrastructure for these applications. Imagine one click upload of a web app from IDEs with load balancing, monitoring, analytics, and profiling.

I'd also like to see some improvements on programming paradigms to take advantage of multicore CPUs. There are lots of ideas in this space, but no clear front runner ideology. I expect we'll continue to see improvements in this space, and hopefully a winner will emerge.

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

nikanj wrote: post #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".

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by AnimalMuppet »

markroseman wrote: post #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.

Came here to say this, but I'm not quite that cynical. No revolutionary change, but there will be incremental improvement. (On the other hand, we're going to keep tackling harder things, so the net gain in the rate programs are produced will be zero or negative.)

I also like the point that the "revolution" is in one aspect, not the whole thing, and it requires changing other aspects, and is therefore much less of a net win than it appears...

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

#57

Post by saagarjha »

CJefferson wrote: post #50

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, o…

I think C and C++ have too much buy-in from too many people to be replaced anytime soon.

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

#58

Post by lazyjones »

I expect to have a visual dataflow programming environment similar to node-red, Yahoo! Pipes etc. that is touchscreen-friendly, has plenty of community-maintained building blocks and converts to a variety of low-level languages for easy deployment to many platforms. Hopefully, we'll get rid of clunky IDEs/text editors with lots of boilerplate, whole file hierarchies to maintain and all that other ancient stuff invented for 1960's teletypes.

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

#59

Post by saagarjha »

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.

Native apps have benefits other than performance…
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