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

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41–50 of 230 posts

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

#41

Some kind of vulnerability tracker for dependencies. You type `gradle somecommand` and it will walk the dependency graph, incl all transient ones, and show you which dependencies currently have an active vulnerability affecting them and the version that fixes it.

Isn't that what dependabot does?

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

#42

I don't know if this exists or not, but it's something I've always wanted. I love and hate unit testing. It's a fantastic idea that I've never seen successfully implemented in practice, mostly because the tests invariably fall by the wayside. At the very least, it's a burden to support them. I'd love a tool that would observe my code during runtime - capturing all inputs and outputs from every function, as well as th…

I'd love a tool that would observe my code during runtime - capturing all inputs and outputs from every function, as well as the value of each variable at each point in the execution flow, and the call graph. Because this would probably incur a performance hit, I'd want to have the option to toggle it on/off.

After execution, I can scroll through a tree of called functions and convert it into permanent "implementation documentation" (saved in a document I can annotate eg. with data flow, and edited when the code itself changes), helping me understand both the structure and dynamic control flow of code I'm learning or relearning after months of absence. I currently do this manually in Google Doc bullets, in order to make sense of legacy code whose control flow is fragmented into many function calls I must piece together mentally (as described in http://number-none.com/blow/john_carmack_on_inlined_code.htm...), and as a starting point for restructuring types and function graphs.

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

#44

I don't know if this exists or not, but it's something I've always wanted. I love and hate unit testing. It's a fantastic idea that I've never seen successfully implemented in practice, mostly because the tests invariably fall by the wayside. At the very least, it's a burden to support them. I'd love a tool that would observe my code during runtime - capturing all inputs and outputs from every function, as well as th…

There's a gem for Ruby that does a limited version of this: https://github.com/testdouble/suture

Suture is geared towards refactoring, so it doesn't do it for every function at once, and instead you have to specify methods manually.

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

#45
I'd find it nice to have a VS Code plugin to hide assertions. Specifically in Python, I see myself writing asserts to check for data boundaries, numpy array sizes, data types.

It takes space and diatracts a bit.

Bonus points if I could have a, for example "# /assertion_func" comment that would label a whole function to be folded together with asserts.

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

#46
At times, I have wanted a text editor that uses a "scroll and zoom" interface for navigating a single, long file. The minimap idea is similar, but I want it fully integrated into the main view.

I'm not sure how useful this would be, but I'd like to try it.

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

#47

I don't know if this exists or not, but it's something I've always wanted. I love and hate unit testing. It's a fantastic idea that I've never seen successfully implemented in practice, mostly because the tests invariably fall by the wayside. At the very least, it's a burden to support them. I'd love a tool that would observe my code during runtime - capturing all inputs and outputs from every function, as well as th…

It doesn't check all your boxes, but have you tried Playwright?

https://playwright.dev

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

#49

- 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…

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

Working on it :)

> - 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.

https://github.com/facebookexperimental/eden

> A note-taking tool that allows me to organize notes in a graph with links between them

https://www.orgroam.com/

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

#50
TL;DR: highlight tailwind / bootstrap classes in VS Code.

Web Dev is only a distant area of expertise of mine. I find learning new things here not complicated, but a bit tedious.

What I'd like is to be able to scan through html files faster. And what hinders me the most, in terms of reading others' code now, is figuring which html classes are custom-declared, and which belong to a design framework, like bootstrap or tailwind.

Being able to tell at skim-speed would be awesome.

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