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

Deep neural networks are being tried everywhere, i.e. for things I didn't imagine they could be useful, others did.

I spent the last half-decade or so in the electronics & software end of the fitness industry and I think there are a lot of niches like this. On the one hand you have the massive market for wrist & chest strap Heart Rate Monitors, and the speed/power meters in stationary bikes. On the other there are many much smaller markets that need a particular type of fitness data that doesn't get a whole lot of external exposure.

Getting the data isn't the hard part; knowing how to make it useful is.

I adore the banner idea here. The various trends are interesting, but I still don't see anything that really sings deeply to me. They all have hints of the real, of a coming harmony & bridging of the gulf between development & user, but they fall short too.

End-user programming comes close, but I don't think it's the real notion. It makes primary the programmability, which is, imo, an unncessary ego-centrism. Software simply making what it does visible, making it observable, and inviting in the potential for interaction, for manipulation, change, alteration: that, to me, is where we must go. I'm delighted and quite surprised to see this comment having risen mightily in the rankings, to the #2 spot, but permit me to cite the #1 comment in reflection here:

> "We’ve known for a long time that software will eat the world — the comings and going’s of everyday life, once they are expressed as code, become infinitely easier to patch and improve using only a keyboard and display."

To me, it's less about home-cooked & home-grown & indie, and more about software that has a basic fair shake. Software is either societal in nature: it participates in, shapes/can be shaped, discusses itself, engages in the democratic processes of the world. Or it is a closed, dark entity. I see little ways to regard most software as anything other than alien and hostile, as invasive & anti-communicative: a blackbox, with us trapped inside.

The way through though is incremental. Finding new ways to let the software we have expose itself, to make itself visible & explicit & introspectable & orchestrateable & controllable & malleable. I believe software high & low will better serve the world, be better able to do it's job, when there is a general systems fabric & when it can keep us in the loop.

Someone already mentioned Unity as ahead of the curve.

I was impressed by it being a “Framework IDE.” It contains hundreds of visual tools and workflows where actual source code files are a small component which you drag and drop into widgets. Each widget is a visual representation of a class, and it’s source code is irrelevant.

Some of these tools are visual state machines, reactions to events, version control, collaboration. Most of us won’t like that change, as we’d lose a lot of control to opinionated rigid tools.

Maybe XCode and Android Studio will evolve to that for the next generation of developers.

Decentralization.

Not: Web3, blockchain, or cryptocurrency

I mean actual online communications not requiring a server, account, or some Ponzi scheme.