I think we all agree that we want faster horses.
And that would be meaningful feedback when we talk about cyborg hourses that OP can try making it faster unlike horses as a species.
I believe my point was that asking users is… tricky.
Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
131–140 of 230 posts
Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This sounds like a great use case for Tree-sitter ( https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ )
GitHub uses Tree-sitter for code highlighting and goto definition, so it already has grammars for many languages
Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
#133Think of all the dev tools you use (debugging, code navigation, etc). Then pick a literate programming system (e.g. org mode with Babel). How many of those dev tools can you use? In my experience: Almost none. A trivial example: Running the tangled code, and getting errors. I know the error is in line 1234, but how do I map that line number to the line in some particular code block? This is the primary thing holding…
First: source maps.
Second: have you tried creating another git repository inside a gitignored directory?
Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This sounds like a great use case for Tree-sitter ( https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ ) GitHub uses Tree-sitter for code highlighting and goto definition, so it already has grammars for many languages
Sure, but that's a library AFAIR. I am talking about an actual CLI tool.
Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
#135Make web development experience in 2023 like desktop development experience in 1998.
Can you elaborate on that? I'm a bit young to have done desktop development in 1998. What aspects of it do you miss?
I’d like to see RAD tools, WYSIWYG editors (that don’t generate awful code), one-click build/deploy without any yaml. I feel like the big cloud providers are really under-invested in this area.
Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
#136A 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 underly…
yeah i've considered something like this. "send a screenshot to my phone of the terminal when activity has stopped for at least x minutes."
tmux has some facility for this now (although i think there's some weird limitation where it can only be setup for panes and not individual windows), it just needs some scripting to capture the contents of the window and send it off.
Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
#137visual debuggers and a node-based programmatic tools.
the former should be able to convert code to graphs and the latter should produce code from graphs.
see Luna programming language, or other nodes based systems especially in 3D/VFX like blender, houdini, nuke, etc.
for visual debugging I'd like to get graph explorers and instrumentation tools for asynchronous logging (but on debug level, rather than logging embedded in code) and visual cues for dataflow and events, etc.
I'd love to spare a little bit of time I have to experiment with such ideas if anyone is down.
Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
#138A C++ IDE that is fast, feature-rich, responsive, bug free and supports C++ 20.
Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
#139Remember 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…
also to add stackshare.io
and I'd love to see this for git repos. like "what-is" command that explains what is in a repo based on files structure and content, what modules and glues are involved. it's impossible to keep up with dependencies these days, especially for someone like me who doesn't code in the freshest stacks on the regular...
Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
also perhaps note worthy: "instrumentation", which I guess is a part of it at least. very useful tool.