Ask HN: What's the next big thing in computing / programming?

If it does it can become huge. Not because of TypeScript as a native language. Not because it can create binaries. Not because it has an audited standard library or any other good reason.

But because it includes a simple but flexible way to prevent itself from doing things the author didn't want it to.

If we are extremely lucky other platforms will pick this up.

1. Prices are down(yes, lower down your guns). I'm not talking about CPUs or GPUs but embedded products. It's absolutely mind blowing that you can get the computational power of a mid-90's computer with the size of a coin for just a few bucks. Same goes for sensors, transceivers, motors and communication modules.

2. 3D printing has come a long way, also dirt cheap and easily accessible to people and is yet another game changer for prototyping. Essentially you can have a functional part in your hands in a day.

3. With works towards lowering carbon footprint(further amplified by inflation), smart devices with low footprint will become more popular-anything which will lower costs. It may sound counter intuitive at first glance but you can imagine how a smart home/office/factory/store/restaurant/anything could be more efficient if power consumption is managed in the most efficient way possible and likely far better than you ever could.

4. Open firmware and hardware is going to be a game changer in another area which seemed completely out of reach just a few years ago - space exploration. Even there, the prices have dropped massively. And there's one more thing when it comes to space exploration: I know that people are really on both extremes when it comes to opinions on Elon Musk but here are my thoughts: ignore what he says and pay attention to what he does. I'm not entirely sure that he's right on electric cars and I suspect that he might not be on the winning side if synthetic fuels become widely available. The one thing which makes me sway towards them are the billions Porsche is pouring into research in that area and credit where it's due: they have been right throughout the entirety of the automotive history.

5. Industrial purposes. Again looking at what Elon Musk is doing - I think he is giving us a glimpse of what Industrial revolution 2.0 might look like. And again something which was further fueled by the pandemic.

The one thing that I see truly missing in the picture is cheap, fast and easy way to make PCB prototypes - that is still an expensive and complicated endeavor. Or at least I am not aware of a cheap and efficient way to do this. I've personally gone as far as trying to figure out a way to use conductive paint for that purpose. With 0 success so far I'm afraid.

- Architecture/patterns. Managing complexity, now and in future, is the primary thing that differentiates a "senior" from a junior IMO. Making complex stuff simple is extremely difficult.

- CI/CD. Improving "shippability" and "shipfriendlyness" helps efficiency and allows getting your software to customers faster.

- TDD/BDD/DDD. Ability to distill features and value from vague customer-feedback and domain-expert. Committing that in specifications, and turning that into automated, and measurable setups. the #1 skill to building software that helps your users, IMO.

While there will remain a shortage of developers in near future, the absolute amount of people producing software will grow significant. The amount of software produced will grow significant while existing software will continue to be there too.

The only way to stand out is to provide real value. To provide that fast. To continue providing that. And to remain able to react to the market quickly.

I therefore believe that skills and techniques that allow you to move faster, be more efficient today and in future, is far more important than learning about web3, kafka, rust, go, kotlin, no-code, or the latest JS framework.

Heterogeneous computing is going to be the norm in everything. Since we’ve trained a generation of programmers to be hardware unaware, there is going to be increasing need for people who can understand all the concepts of how to tie all these different devices together to keep this huge group of people productive. I would also lump network devices into this category as the trend to disaggregate accelerates and lower latency access protocols/methods are needed.

Embedded SW is going to be more important as devices get more powerful. If we are truly to see AR devices I think this is definitely the case. The difference between FW/SW will continue to blur. Will also need people who understand HW to best optimize for power consumption.

Power consumption aware computing and profiling. As we hit physical limits of power density in data centers, we will need good ways to profile power consumption of code and power based optimization of code. This is obviously a thing already in mobile devices. But expect power aware computing to become more and more prevalent everywhere over time.

(a) Important stepwise changes in a domain are actually rarer than we think. Transformers & deep learning being one good example.

(b) Focusing on the background information prepares you for that stepwise change, and recognize the stepwise change when it happens

Instead of trying to suss out from the tech literatti every new thing and chase that, I'd rather spend my time on "old things" and be better prepared for the right stepwise changes.

There's a lot of 'revolutionary' and 'big ideas' that in reality are marketing and/or repackaging old ideas.