Ask HN: What is the ideal developer experience in 2020?

- typechecked, but the types get out of the way; "var" and intellisense fill them in for you. It also shows you what types the function arguments should be and autosuggests objects of those types

- functional when you want, but not when you don't: LINQ et al, interlinkage with F# if you want to get really functional, now immutable record types. Lambdas.

- wordy enough that you can see context, but Intellisense means not having to type it out

- smart refactoring (paid-for Resharper)

- debugger when you need it: run test case. Wait to hit exception or breakpoint on failed assertion. Inspect values. It's often immediately obvious where the problem was.

- CPU and memory profilers readily available and well integrated.

- standardised on Nunit with Nsubstitute for testing: bit wordy, but with a bit of thought we're now hitting 100% line coverage on wholly new code.

- portable ish binaries with Mono

- package management system is mature. (Wart: packages are at the "project" rather than "solution" level in VS, so you need to do extra work to ensure they're all the same version)

The only real downside is the build system (MSBuild) is pretty poor, badly documented, and not easy to use for other things than C#.

For the future? "Software components" have never quite delivered. Package management is clearly the frontier here.

Language interoperability is another: it's still astonishingly hard to combine languages within a single software artefact unless they're C and C++ or similar things that produce platform-native binaries. Proliferation of language runtimes makes this worse, not better. On the other hand, the two frontrunner runtimes of C# and Java both have problematic owners.

Got it.

My experience is that technology has never stood in my way. It may be inconvenient, but I always find a way to work with it.

The thing that has always been in my way is other people. Always.

For me:

1. A boss who has a clue. Who has actually built software deployed to production at least once. Who understands the customer's business. Who manages things and leads people, not the other way around. Who gives me my assignments, the resources I'll need, and leaves me alone.

2. Project managers who know how to run projects.

3. Business analysts who know how to conduct analysis.

4. The decision to either go agile or not. No more sprints, stand-ups, scrum masters, product owners, retrospectives, etc, etc, etc, unless we do it completely and do it right.

5. Anyone, anywhere who writes something, anything down. No more, "Don't you remember when Sue asked Michael and he got Fred to tell us in that skype?" (My answer is always, "No.")

6. Any environment where I spend 90% of my time programming and 10% on overhead, not the other way around.

7. Authority to go along with my responsibility. I'm tired hitting every deadline and forced to wait weeks (or months!) for Peer Review, Code Review, Design Review, Standards Review, User Acceptance Testing, Integration Testing, Quality Review (against what standard?), Steering Committee approval, Leadership approval, approval from God herself...

8. A minimal acceptable competence level for my teammates, achieved by proper vetting (including tech interviews and tests). Software development is achieved as fast as the weakest link, not the strongest one.

9. No meetings!!! If it isn't written down, it isn't. If it is written down, you probably don't need to meet.

I could go one all day, but I'm late for a meeting. :-(

I disagree here slightly. I think it's reasonable that a database setup may be necessary, especially if abstraction layers (ie. ORMs) aren't being used for SQL, and SQLite is not your database of choice. Sure, you could set up docker, but not every project adopts or even likes docker.