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Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

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Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#91

Post by sgillen »

bjourne wrote: post #87
IceDane wrote: post #61

Not a lot of comments so far, but a few people are talking about stuff that is in the general vein of better tooling and code generation/automation through deeper code understanding by our tooling. I think that this sentiment is interesting, because the way I see it, this can only happen if we continue the trend of transitioning to static typing. We can't really do much more for dynamic language tooling today than we…

Static typing is in my opinion the lazy language designer's way out. Yes, it allows for some introspection but only because the programmer has to type in all this type information! In 2019, we can do so much better. For example, development consists of typing some code, running it, typing some more, running it again and so on. The run time likely already guesses (correctly) the types of most variables for optimizatio…

As to your last point those variables could be anything, even in the simple examples you list. Size could be a tuple with the shape of some multidimensional thing, it could the the string "Large" temperature could also reasonably be a string "45C".

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#92

Post by tonyedgecombe »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #29

> Another productivity booster is Cross-Platform frameworks. I would be so, so happy to see a UI framework that runs (well) on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. My druthers would be for it to have bondings to a JVM language (Kotlin is my happy place these days), but I would be okay writing in any similarly productive language. Flutter is trying to get there, but it's not a viable solution on the desktop yet, and…

People have been banging on about cross platform frameworks for years now. They are all too much of a compromise. It probably won't get any better than what we have now.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#93

Post by jqcoffey »

A quick scan through the comments and I was surprised that no one referenced the No Silver Bullet essay[0].

From where I sit I find that the Cambrian explosion of frameworks, systems and methodologies is causing us to regress in terms of productivity.

[0] http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#95

Post by tboyd47 »

rajacombinator wrote: post #94

Have there been any major productivity gains in the past 5-10 years? Not really. So I see no reason to expect any in the next 5-10 years.

Agreed. Productivity is just another word for control. The trend is to transfer control away from the developer and to the identity provider (OAuth2), app store (Apple/Google), search engine (AMP), cloud provider (AWS serverless), content author (Wordpress), ad exchange (DoubleClick), CTO (microservices) etc. Not necessarily good or bad, but no reason to expect that trend to reverse.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#96

Post by ianbicking »

yodon wrote: post #28

TypeScript revolutionized the act of writing JavaScript React and JSX revolutionized the act of writing HTML GraphQL revolutionized the act of connecting front end and back end But for CSS... SASS, SCSS, LESS, and such are by comparison pretty pedestrian tweaks on vanilla CSS

I think React is an interesting thing to think about here. There was a bunch of libraries that got ever-more-fancy about doing DOM manipulation. Those libraries helped manage the complexity of the model of doing in-place DOM manipulation. React chose something different – much more like the templates of yore – and instead of managing the complexity it introduced a simpler model that eliminated the complexity. That made it really different.

SASS/etc help manage the complexity of CSS, but they don't simplify anything at all. I think there's a scope problem here: the styling and layout of an application isn't just a bunch of selectors and styles in CSS. It's the class names and structure in the code, it's the implied connections between the expected rendered layout, it's a private language of expected elements and their semantics. You can't simplify that just using CSS. We're still waiting on someone to come up with a combined approach that actually works. I personally eagerly await someone's genius idea!

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#97

Post by ianbicking »

Runtime code analysis: instead of analyzing code at rest, we need to have better tools to tell us what the code actually does. Static typing doesn't help you trace back from an interface to the code that generated that interface. Runtime analysis can potentially be applied across systems, so we can analyze not just one program, but how a whole myriad of systems work together, which is the way most complex systems work.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#98

Post by spdebbarma »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #29

> Another productivity booster is Cross-Platform frameworks. I would be so, so happy to see a UI framework that runs (well) on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. My druthers would be for it to have bondings to a JVM language (Kotlin is my happy place these days), but I would be okay writing in any similarly productive language. Flutter is trying to get there, but it's not a viable solution on the desktop yet, and…

The Flutter dev team are currently conducting a survey and a couple questions were regarding desktop mode so I reckon Hummingbird is coming pretty soon.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#99

Post by kgraves »

carlosdp wrote: post #75
thomascgalvin wrote: post #29

> Another productivity booster is Cross-Platform frameworks. I would be so, so happy to see a UI framework that runs (well) on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. My druthers would be for it to have bondings to a JVM language (Kotlin is my happy place these days), but I would be okay writing in any similarly productive language. Flutter is trying to get there, but it's not a viable solution on the desktop yet, and…

I'm on the PWA + WebAssembly train now as a solution for this. I really think we're finally getting close to a world where desktop-apps become truly pointless with Wasm + PWAs, and the WebGPU spec.

This. WebAssembly is in a unique position to be tackling this problem since modern web browsers already have sandboxed OS level access to cameras, microphones, desktop, bluetooth and hopefully GPUs.

The future of running Autodesk, Adobe software and AAA grade games on the web is coming nearer with WASM.

Re: Ask HN: What big programming productivity gains you see happening in 5-10 yrs?

#100

Post by crimsonalucard »

enkiv2 wrote: post #7

Maybe the software industry will discover constraint programming the way that it discovered functional programming over the past decade. If it did, that would almost immediately increase programmer productivity for non-performance-critical tasks (since the compiler could supply the implementation), while making formal methods more easily applicable to production code & supplying the prerequisites for more clever auto…

Time is a flat circle.

The industry oscillates. Each oscillation is a mirage that presents itself as a productivity gain but is in actuality an echo of the past.

Are the techniques we use today really more productive?

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