[HN Gopher] What will programming look like in 2020? (2012)
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       What will programming look like in 2020? (2012)
        
       Author : slbtty
       Score  : 29 points
       Date   : 2021-09-25 21:09 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (lambda-the-ultimate.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (lambda-the-ultimate.org)
        
       | Micoloth wrote:
       | The " Some safe and some bold predictions" comment is almost
       | exactly my view on how programming should evolve. (functional,
       | reactive, going toward dependent types etc ) Interesting how in
       | 2012 it was already so clear!
       | 
       | I think mostly we do have gone in that direction, even if
       | probably even slower than the (already cautious) commenter
       | predicted.
       | 
       | Honest question: why are we as a community so slow at evolving a
       | good, solid programming environment?
       | 
       | I get that each time a new language is introduced, porting over
       | all the existing code + training the people is an immense task.
       | But this is _exactly the problem_, right?
       | 
       | Why aren't we able to stop for a while and sort out once and for
       | all a solid framework for coding?
       | 
       | It's not a theoretical ideal: I'm very convinced that the dumb
       | piling up of technologies/languages/frameworks that we use now is
       | significantly slowing down the _actual daily work_ we do of
       | producing software. Definitely >>50% of my time as a programmer
       | is spent on accidental complexity, that i know for sure.
       | 
       | It's very practical: at this point this whole thing simply feels
       | like very bad engineering, tbh?
        
       | cortesoft wrote:
       | One person predicted the AI IDE assistance. They were right that
       | it is here, although I don't think it is very accepted yet.
       | 
       | No one mentioned containers or anything related.
        
       | Macha wrote:
       | For a mere 8 year timeframe, the predictions seem rather poor. It
       | feels like there was such a push among people to have the forward
       | thinking ideas that they overestimated how much would change.
       | 
       | Looking back, the biggest changes between now and 2012 are:
       | 
       | * Git (and github) took over the world in the version control.
       | Git was already the leader in 2012, but mercurial was doing ok
       | and svn was still around to a much greater extent.
       | 
       | * Docker/Kubernetes and the container ecosystem. There was a
       | guess here about app servers, but the poster seemed to thinking
       | of PaaS platforms and Java app servers like Jetty more so. I
       | guess you could say "serverless" is sort of in that vein, but
       | it's far from the majority of use cases as the poster predicted.
       | 
       | * Functional programming ideas became mainstream, except in Go,
       | which is a sort of reactionary back to basics language.
       | 
       | Overall though:
       | 
       | Good predictions:
       | 
       | * The IDE/editor space gets a shake up, though maybe not in the
       | way any of the specific predictions guessed (the rise of VS code)
       | 
       | * Machine learning gets bigger
       | 
       | * Apple introduces a new language to replace Objective-C
       | 
       | * Some sort of middle ground to the dynamic/static divide (static
       | languages have got local type inference, dynamic languages have
       | got optional typing)
       | 
       | Bad predictions:
       | 
       | * No-code tools are still no further along mainstream adoption
       | than 2012
       | 
       | * Various predictions that Lisp/ML/Haskell get more mainstream
       | rather than just having their most accessible ideas cherry
       | picked.
       | 
       | * A new development in version control displaces git
       | 
       | * DSLs, DSLs everywhere. DSLs for app development, DSLs for
       | standard cross database NoSQL access,
        
         | Zababa wrote:
         | > Functional programming ideas became mainstream, except in Go,
         | which is a sort of reactionary back to basics language.
         | 
         | I feel like there is also a return to basic imperative
         | programming, with OO and functional where it makes sense.
        
       | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
       | Rust in 2021 is basically the functional programming language
       | this commenter was predicting:
       | 
       | > I predict that functional programming will continue to gain
       | ground as people discover the benefits of immutability and easy
       | parallelismaEUR"but the functional language will not be Haskell,
       | nor Scala, nor Clojure. At a guess, people will use something
       | with:
       | 
       | >Strong tooling and libraries
       | 
       | >An accessible type system
       | 
       | >Deterministic memory behaviour
       | 
       | >By-default strict evaluation
       | 
       | >Commercial backing
       | 
       | >Every mainstream functional language is lacking in at least one
       | of these areas.
        
         | neutronicus wrote:
         | Rust is basically C++++ so I doubt it's what that commenter had
         | in mind
        
       | midwestemo wrote:
       | >What will programming look like in 2020?
       | 
       | It will be a complete shit.
       | 
       | http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4655#comment-73750
        
       | adenozine wrote:
       | Link seems busted for me...
        
       | Turing_Machine wrote:
       | Server has apparently fallen over. Wayback Machine link:
       | 
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20210925211554/http://lambda-the...
       | 
       | P.S. these are predictions made in 2012 of what 2020 was going to
       | be like.
        
         | Turing_Machine wrote:
         | No good deed goes unpunished.
        
       | dang wrote:
       | A couple small threads from back then:
       | 
       |  _What will programming look like in 2020?_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4962694 - Dec 2012 (3
       | comments)
       | 
       |  _Ask HN: What will programming look like in 2020?_ -
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4931774 - Dec 2012 (12
       | comments)
        
       | tardibear wrote:
       | 2012
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Added. Thanks!
        
       | junon wrote:
       | http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4655#comment-73772
       | 
       | > ... the beginnings of intelligent ... assistants in our IDEs
       | ... specialize (sic) in ... C/C++, Java, Mobile. They will have
       | intimate knowledge of common APIs ... trained on tens of
       | thousands of code projects pulled from the open repositories
       | across the web (google code, github, bitbucket,...). In addition
       | to having 'read' more orders of magnitude more code then any
       | human could in a lifetime, they will also have rudimentary
       | ability to extract programmer intent, and organizational patterns
       | from code. ... The computer automatically bringing up example
       | code snippets, suggesting references to existing functionality
       | that could be reused.
       | 
       | This person (Marc DeRosa) predicted Github Copilot within a
       | margin of one year. Incredible.
        
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       (page generated 2021-09-25 23:00 UTC)