71–80 of 364 posts
Something like Ubuntu Edge for those who remember it, but with more local storage -- TBs maybe -- more connectivity out of the box.
Development environments. The amount of time and hassle I've seen lost to getting a working development environment up and running is incredible. Every time I talk to someone who's learning to program I tell them: "Setting up your development environment will be a nightmare. I have been doing this for twenty years and it's STILL a nightmare for me every time I do it. You are not alone." Docker is reasonably good here…
Having my phone as my ultimate CPU, immediately connectable to commodity peripherals (monitor, keyboard, printers) at home, office and on the street. Content would be stored on the phone following the "local fist" principle to favor speed and security. Something like Ubuntu Edge for those who remember it, but with more local storage -- TBs maybe -- more connectivity out of the box.
I realize now it’ll probably never happen, since the companies making the phones are the same companies that make computers.
Having to check out the branch, install dependencies, build the code and run it only to then go back to the UI to see the changes and comments is very time consuming and being able to test suggested changes instantly would save me a ton of time.
I would gladly pay for this.
A programming language with Python-like syntax and a Hindley-Milner type system plus typeclasses. Basically, we bring Haskell’s type system an imperative programming language. An easy-to-learn scripting language with a strong, sound type system with reliable type inference will reduce bugs in codebases of every size across the industry.
Disclaimer: I haven't used either language, just learned about Raku recently from this[2] excellent FOSDEM talk.
Development environments. The amount of time and hassle I've seen lost to getting a working development environment up and running is incredible. Every time I talk to someone who's learning to program I tell them: "Setting up your development environment will be a nightmare. I have been doing this for twenty years and it's STILL a nightmare for me every time I do it. You are not alone." Docker is reasonably good here…
I was impressed by the low latency (at least as of a few months ago). If you make a web app right, it can be faster than a resource-hogging local IDE!
I don't use it myself every day because I've already been using vim/screen/bash for 15+ years. Those are my lightweight REPLs.
But if I were advising someone to code, and they wanted to skip the dev env, I would probably try repl.it. They also have impressive concurrent editing facilities in any language.
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I also think the question is malformed, because I would hesitate to say there's any "single problem" in software development. It's all death by a thousand paper cuts.
The "dev env" problem is real, but it's really a problem with 100+ different tools. It's an architecture/ecosystem problem.
repl.it has some creative solutions to these problems, though it's still a ton of work. I think they are doing great but it's not going to solve all problems.
For example, another popular dev env is for data science or machine learning researchers. RStudio is doing some good stuff there, and there's Google colab, etc.
Software development is very big diverse and it's hard to imagine one solution cutting across all of it.
Open source implementation of Microsoft Excel, which lets you write macros using Python and has the plotting, scheduling and report sharing functionality of Tableau.