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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?

#81

Post by arinlen »

danielvaughn wrote: post #5

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. Because this would probably incur a performance hit, I'd want to have the option to toggle it on/off.

There's a class of integration tests dubbed consistency tests, which tracks the output that an interface provides give a specific input in production, and the test consists of playing back a sample of said production traffic to verify if the service remains consistent before promoting/dialing it up in production.

This class of integration tests is also used in UI tests, and Selenium provides explicit support for them.

https://elementalselenium.com/tips/62-web-consistency-testin...

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

#82

Post by foobarbaz33 »

More image based development. Developing against the running program. Ability to debug unhanded errors in real time while you fix them. Like how you do with Lisp/SLIME.

I think this is the best way to develop hands down. But its flown under the radar through the entire 90's era up to the present.

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

#83

Post by MivLives »

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others.

Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there"

I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

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

#84

Post by matt_heimer »

ktzar wrote: post #13

Chrome Dev tools allowing to mock a specific URL with a local file or replacing parts of it to point to a localhost mocks service.

Replacing a GET URL with a file is supported natively with local overrides in Chrome's DevTools. https://developer.chrome.com/blog/new-in-devtools-65/#overri...

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

#85

Post by abrichr »

pdimitar wrote: post #80

CLI / TUI parsers and analyzers of code. Let's not compartmentalize those into super-complex graphical IDEs. I'd like to be able to do e.g. `$TOOL functions path/to/module.rs` and get a flat list with only names or full function signatures (configurable by CLI switches). I'd also like to have some pre-baked analyzers e.g. find all controllers in Rails / Phoenix / Laravel / ActixWeb projects. Or all views, templates,…

Interesting. What are the limitations associated with current tooling, e.g. described at https://kadimi.com/cli-refactoring/ and https://waylonwalker.com/refactor-in-cli/ ?

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

#86

Post by danielvaughn »

arinlen wrote: post #81
danielvaughn wrote: post #5

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. Because this would probably incur a performance hit, I'd want to have the option to toggle it on/off. There's a class of integration tests dubbed consistency tests, which tracks the output that an interface provides give a specif…

Ah very nice, that sounds close to what I'm imagining. Will check it out, thanks.

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

#87

Post by pdimitar »

abrichr wrote: post #85
pdimitar wrote: post #80

CLI / TUI parsers and analyzers of code. Let's not compartmentalize those into super-complex graphical IDEs. I'd like to be able to do e.g. `$TOOL functions path/to/module.rs` and get a flat list with only names or full function signatures (configurable by CLI switches). I'd also like to have some pre-baked analyzers e.g. find all controllers in Rails / Phoenix / Laravel / ActixWeb projects. Or all views, templates,…

Interesting. What are the limitations associated with current tooling, e.g. described at https://kadimi.com/cli-refactoring/ and https://waylonwalker.com/refactor-in-cli/ ?

The limitations are that these are very plain regexes. I've screwed up a good amount of time doing that, it's not good enough. We need actual structured semantic analysis, the way the compiler / interpreter does it.

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

#88

Post by bogwog »

billfruit wrote: post #77

3D graphics especially interactive interfaces is still far too complicated, presently needing to be build over layer upon layer of libraries and toolkits. I think a simpler approach will be a good thing to have for developers.

What do you mean by layers? Vulkan, opengl, metal, directx, etc are all pretty low-level APIs. They’re complicated to use, but architecturally simple (at least from the end user perspective)

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

#89

Post by vmsp »

MivLives wrote: post #83

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others. Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there" I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

There's an Emacs mode that does this called annotate. But why would this be better than just leaving a comment on the file?

https://github.com/bastibe/annotate.el

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

#90

Post by _boffin_ »

MivLives wrote: post #83

I want a tool that lets me annotate a codebase but with the notes stored locally and not in the code. This would mostly be for corporate code bases so I can take notes/ leave more explicit warnings for others. Less "Turns markdown into react components" and more "If you have to touch this, you need to go to file x, add it there" I understand this is imperfect but so is the codebase I work on.

This isn't explicitly what you're asking for, but it's something: https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/16998-notebook

I'm currently thinking of how to do exactly what you described with intellij plugin's. I've realized, that for me, i'm best when i print out code, use rulers to draw dividers between methods and other stuff, and then take notes for different parts of the code.

don't mind the horrid writing that's most likely unintelligible: https://i.ibb.co/ByTm7vt/notes.jpg

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