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

I see webassembly terribly fragmenting the frontend skill distribution, not in a good way.

I see the next generation of programmers more populated by tech debt creators and less accepting of mentorship.

I see non-volatile storage gains dramatically changing how OSs think about RAM and storage, even to the point that we might see RAM mostly vanish (unless you need volatility, like crypto keys), and machine shutdown/startup becoming instant. As non-volatile storage continues to approach RAM latency, we'll need a new generation of operating systems and probably programming languages too.

I see people continuing to overpay for PaaS systems that can't scale, creating software that's ever more difficult to change and tightly coupled to proprietary cloud systems.

With the excuse being increased productivity because Japanese is easier to understand.

Assuming this would even be true it is only true if you put in the work.

Think of how many people use to know js and css. If they didn't pay close attention for say 10 years they are out. The effort put into progressing things failed to make things easy to use for them.

Therefore I think the future will be more about creating self explanatory tools.

All of the developer tools part of the OS smoothly working together without blaming the user for failing to live up to configuration challenges.

Make it so that we can put a newbie or a child in front of a highly complex repository and have him figure out how everything works without help.

For example, development consists of typing some code, running it, typing some more, running it again and so on. The run time likely already guesses (correctly) the types of most variables for optimization purposes. But then this information is thrown away for no good reason. It can trivially be reused to provide context-sensitive auto-completion and other features.

In general, why is editing, compilation and running still treated as three separate steps? Clearly, a lot of information could flow from each step to the other. It's not like a programmer compartmentalizes the job in that way. To him or her its one task which is to write software.

And why on earth do we tolerate editors that doesn't know what a "size" is? Every half-decent programmer knows "size" is a positive integer. Just as we know that "filename" is a string, "temperature" a real and "is_complete" a boolean value. But the editor doesn't. When I write mail_recepient for the umpteenth time it doesn't even try to help me! There is so much low-hanging fruit here just waiting for someone to make better.