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Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

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Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#31

Post by stepchowfun »

- A build system / package manager like Nix [1] but with a better user experience / more straightforward command-line tooling.

- A dependently typed programming language like Coq [2] (or Agda, Idris, Lean, etc.) that is sufficiently approachable to gain enough mindshare that companies start adopting it for mission-critical work.

- A version control system which scales to petabytes or more. Something that I could put large video files in without thinking twice about it. Something a large company could use for their monorepo—or even their data warehouse.

- A note-taking tool that allows me to organize notes in a graph with links between them (like a wiki), not as files and folders in a tree, which enforces the invariant that every note is transitively reachable from some "root" (by following links) so I never lose a note.

- Something like Toast [3] but which is also designed for running services in production, not just local development and continuous integration. A unified way to run code in dev, test, and prod environments. A new k8s.

[1] https://nixos.org/

[2] https://coq.inria.fr/

[3] https://github.com/stepchowfun/toast (shameless plug)

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#32

Post by tnzk »

cehrlich wrote: post #27

TypeScript stuff: 1. A tool for debugging TypeScript (in VSCode) that shows the provided and expected types, and how they are different, in a way that is easy to read. Instead of having a bunch of nested paragraphs in plain text, show it in two columns, each displaying how a normal person would write a type declaration. Maybe even use color (highlighting?) to show which parts are different. 2. A tool for VSCode that…

Agree on 2 if you meant something like inlay hists in rust-analyzer.

https://rust-analyzer.github.io/manual.html#inlay-hints

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#34

Post by Hackbraten »

junon wrote: post #28
Hackbraten wrote: post #20

Remember the early web, when people used to look at existing websites to learn how it was done? “View Source” used to be a career-starter for a lot of people, but has become largely useless today due to transpilation, frameworks, and other abstraction layers. I’d love to see a browser extension provide an “Explain Source” context menu item, which sends you to a pane in Developer Tools that shows: - an estimation whic…

builtwith.com?

A bit like that. But for web dev, not sales intelligence.

And, most importantly: fully offline (so you can be sure nobody learns about the sites you visit).

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#35

Post by Hackbraten »

Snowworm wrote: post #26
Hackbraten wrote: post #20

Remember the early web, when people used to look at existing websites to learn how it was done? “View Source” used to be a career-starter for a lot of people, but has become largely useless today due to transpilation, frameworks, and other abstraction layers. I’d love to see a browser extension provide an “Explain Source” context menu item, which sends you to a pane in Developer Tools that shows: - an estimation whic…

That would be great. You could also recommend extensions to be installed if a website uses a certain framework. For example, the react Dev tools extension can be used to view the source of react apps in a more intuitive way compared to the rendered html file.

Good point!

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#37

Post by doerig »

Hackbraten wrote: post #20

Remember the early web, when people used to look at existing websites to learn how it was done? “View Source” used to be a career-starter for a lot of people, but has become largely useless today due to transpilation, frameworks, and other abstraction layers. I’d love to see a browser extension provide an “Explain Source” context menu item, which sends you to a pane in Developer Tools that shows: - an estimation whic…

There is https://www.wappalyzer.com/ which does most of what you are looking for.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#39

Post by carlbarrdahl »

I would love to see tools in these categories:

- Sets constraints on how we write code - like a combination of a powerful linter and templates or patterns.

- Visualizes code-base and flow of code - quickly navigate to the relevant code as well as show the available functions in the code-base so newly onboarded devs can more easily re-use code than write new functions.

- Press record to capture 3rd-party requests and store as json mocks to use with a Mock Service Worker (msw)

Anything that improves the feedback loop, visualizes code-base, reduces context-switching or simplifies flow of code.

Storybook keeps impressing me. It's often misunderstood as a documentation tool but it's more than that. It let's you:

- develop components in isolation, greatly improving the feedback loop and sets constraints on what the component takes in as props and what it renders.

- testing for visual, accessability, interactions etc.

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