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I have a dream that one day we'll collectively realize that "buying programmers the best tools" means the most powerful, and not the shiniest. Then we'll all be
by vosper 9y ago
I have a dream that one day we'll collectively realize that "buying programmers the best tools" means the most powerful, and not the shiniest. Then we'll all be running ultra-wide monitors with room for many different visual aides on the one screen, backed by the CPU horsepower (overclocked and liquid cooled, if necessary) to make it all fast. And, hopefully, we'll see what an IDE can really be.
- danblick 9y agoAs long as we're speculating: I kind of dream that maybe we'll see programming environments that take advantage of VR. Humans are really good at remembering spaces. ("Describe for me your childhood bedroom." or "What did your third grade teacher look like?") There's already the idea of "memory palaces" [1] suggesting you can take advantage of spatial memory for other purposes. I wonder, what would it be like to learn or search a codebase by walking through it and looking around? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> Humans are really good at remembering spaces. ("Describe for me your childhood bedroom." or "What did your third grade teacher look like?") Some humans. I honestly can't answer you those two questions. I'm much better in remembering what I just read than what space I just saw, and I absolutely suck at remembering (not to mention describing) faces. If you mugged me I probably wouldn't be able to describe you to police beyond the basics like gender and height (I probably won't be remembering what you were wearing). I say this because being good at remembering spaces is like "everyone sketch a picture when trying to convey an idea" elsewhere in the thread - both are examples of what some people do, and it may be surprising to discover that not all humans are good at it.
- futhey 9y agoI have face blindness. You may as well, or at least some degree of aphantasia. No reason for concern, but there is supposedly an incredibly low occurrence of either.
- aargh_aargh 9y agoMy dream is the opposite. Constrain programmers to hardware that's 2 generations old. That will force us to make our programs run fast in this environment which is much closer to what actual users will use to running it. I do understand the implication that lowering the need for always faster hardware for end users will slow down the pace of development of new hardware. But with the end of Moore's law upon us, that's inevitable anyway. Our computers are plenty fast today, beyond what we could imagine when each of us started programming. Let's cut down on abstractions. Let's profile, optimize.
- vanderZwan 9y agoI wrote some of my fastest code on a netbook. It's also the gnarliest code I ever wrote and I do not wish to touch it again.
- loup-vaillant 9y agoYou can have it both ways: power the IDE with a futuristic power hungry beefy machine, and run the programs it produces on a throttled sandbox that match the slower target machines. I fear cheating would be too easy, though —just lift the restrictions.
- IceDane 9y agoAfter being stuck with a really, really bad laptop for the past 4 years, I can't disagree more whole-heartedly. I wouldn't wish that experience on my worst enemy, heh. Though I wish more time was spent on some tools to make them more memory efficient(I'm looking at you, scala and friends), that's just not how it is today. I just bought a new laptop with 32 gigs of ram, and hopefully that is future-proof for the next few years.