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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?

#111

Post by macintux »

huijzer wrote: post #63
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 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. Are you using object-oriented programming or a more functional style? Without classes, unit tests become a lot more readable and manageable.

So much this, both in the tested code and in the test code itself. I only started unit testing in Python once I discovered pytest; the built-in unit test framework was such a cognitive mismatch for my usual coding style.

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

#112

Post by activitypea »

Keyboard-focused text editors. Reaching for the mouse pointer is super annoying, unless I'm using an undocked macbook (which itself is an ergonomics nightmare). Emacs and Vim are fine enough, but both are old software with plenty of baggage. I don't find Vim's mnemonics comfy or intuitive, and Emacs' performance is abysmal by text editor standards. I believe more competition in the space, especially from big players, would yield significantly better software. But right now, it seems that the big players have settled for command pallettes that get them 90% of the way there, which for me just made the remaining 10% stand out more. I hope Zed[0] changes this.

[0] https://zed.dev/

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

jiehong wrote: post #22

Find a way with entr[0] and an http server to tell the browser to reload the currently viewed file if it changes. Today, entr allows you to restart a command when a file changes. A web server allows you to serve local files to your browser. If you use npm, lots of libs allow you to serve your web ui, and make the browser reload the page when something has changed. But this is tied to npm, and even to the framework yo…

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by danielvaughn »

huijzer wrote: post #63
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 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. Are you using object-oriented programming or a more functional style? Without classes, unit tests become a lot more readable and manageable.

Always functional; I'd never try to implement unit testing with classes, that sounds like a nightmare. I'm not talking about the difficulties of writing a unit test, which is where the oop/functional divide is important. I'm talking about the increased time to market, the difficulties of maintaining tests over time, the need to have everyone on the team be equally committed to tdd, etc etc. These are the things that kill good testing practices.

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

#116

Post by azhenley »

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…

Not only explain the source, but also format and present it in a nicer way.

Many websites’ code now are minified so I have to copy and paste it around then manually clean it up before I can start reading it.

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

#117

Post by thewebcount »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #8

I just want Xcode, but less buggy. A lot less buggy. Sheesh.

So much this! And faster. Why does single stepping take visible seconds and cause visible redraws of all the panes in the debugger? WTF? It wasn’t this slow when we had 25MHz CPUs running GUIs, why is it so slow now? (Yeah, systems are more complicated, but they’re also a hell of a lot faster and have more CPUs to distribute the work around!)

Also could we get documentation on things like Instruments? I don’t just mean stuff like “this button opens the whatever pane.” I mean how do you use it and what does its output mean? I’ve rarely seen such useless documentation. (Well, Unix man pages, I guess.)

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

#118

Post by ayewo »

A CLI tool that can be used to observe and act on the return code and/or output of any CLI tool on Linux. It should have a way to notify [1] the user after a long-running CLI program terminates on Linux.

It would have similar semantics to the time utility. Let's call this tool timed.

For instance, prefixing any task with the time utility e.g. "time dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb" would output the duration of the underlying task.

Similarly, executing "timed dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb" would send a notification to the user when the task completes containing the return code and any console output.

1: Paired with something like https://github.com/binwiederhier/ntfy. This would allow a user to set up multiple ways to receive the notification, including Telegram/Slack, SMS, push notification, email or simply just turning console outputs into a continuous audio note similar to http://listen.hatnote.com/

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

#119

Post by thewebcount »

GnarfGnarf wrote: post #38

I would love an IDE where I can create documentation formatted as tables, colors, graphics etc. directly in the source code comments. Also, I would like to show selected function or variable names in bold or larger fonts. Viz. Knuth Warp/Weft.

This would be awesome! I can’t stand ASCII art. I can rarely tell what they’re trying to draw and it looks awful.
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