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FWIW I think that DOES happen, but it happens on the "wrong" computers! Google has at least tens of thousands of cores running builds and tests 24/7. And they

by chubot 8y ago

FWIW I think that DOES happen, but it happens on the "wrong" computers! Google has at least tens of thousands of cores running builds and tests 24/7. And they're utilized to the hilt. Travis and other continuous build services do essentially the same thing, although I don't know how many cores they have running. From a larger perspective, Github does significant things "in the background" to make me more productive, like producing statistics about all the projects and making them searchable. (Admittedly, it could do MUCH more.) I think part of the problem is that it's cheaper to use "the cloud" than to figure out how to use the developer's own machine! There is a lot of heterogeneity in developer machines, and all the system administration overhead isn't worth it. And there's also networking latency. So it's easiest to just use a homogeneous cloud like Google's data centers or AWS. There's also stuff like https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz which improves productivity. I do think that most software will be tested 24/7 by computers in the future. Foundation DB already does this: "Testing Distributed Systems w/ Deterministic Simulation" by Will Wilson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc&t=2s Autonomous Testing and the Future of Software Development - Will Wilson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFSPwJFXVlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFSPwJFXVlw They have sort of an "adversarial" development model where the tests are "expected" to find bugs that programmers introduce. So it's basically like having an oracle you can consult for correctness, which is a productivity aid. Not exactly, but that would be the ideal.

abecedarius 8y ago
Neat -- I haven't worked at Google but wondered what they might be doing on this score. There's probably lots of potential for modern AI to hack at programmer productivity more directly. Machine learning so far has been more of a complement than a substitute, but I'm imagining a workflow where a lot of the time you're writing tests/types/contracts/laws and letting your assistant draft the code to satisfy them. You write a test, when you're done you see there's a new function ready for you coded to satisfy a previous test, you take a look and maybe go "Oh, this is missing a case" and mark it incomplete and add another test to fill it out. Maybe in the sci-fi future programming looks more like strategic guidance; nearer term perhaps we might see 500 cores going full blast to speed up your coding work by 20% on average. Or maybe not! But it's one idea.

by chubot 8y ago

abecedarius 8y ago

Neat -- I haven't worked at Google but wondered what they might be doing on this score. There's probably lots of potential for modern AI to hack at programmer productivity more directly. Machine learning so far has been more of a complement than a substitute, but I'm imagining a workflow where a lot of the time you're writing tests/types/contracts/laws and letting your assistant draft the code to satisfy them. You write a test, when you're done you see there's a new function ready for you coded to satisfy a previous test, you take a look and maybe go "Oh, this is missing a case" and mark it incomplete and add another test to fill it out. Maybe in the sci-fi future programming looks more like strategic guidance; nearer term perhaps we might see 500 cores going full blast to speed up your coding work by 20% on average. Or maybe not! But it's one idea.