Over 10 years ago, I had this sort of a prediction that, with the massive adoption of a dynamic language like javascript on both client/server sides and test-driven development gaining a lot of ground, the future of programming would be dynamic and “feedback-driven”. As in, you would immediately see the results of your code as you type, based on the tests you created. To naively simplify, imagine a split screen of your code editor and a console view showing relevant watch expressions from the code you’re typing.
Instead what happened was the industry’s focus shifted to type safety and smart compilers, and I followed along. I’m just not smart enough to question where the whole industry was heading. And my speck of imagination on how coding would have looked like in the future wasn’t completely thought out. It was just that, a speck of imagination that occurred to me as I was debugging something tedious.
Now, most of the programming language world, seem to be focusing on smarter compilers. But is there some language or platform, that focus instead on a different kind of programming paradigm (not sort of OOP, FP paradigm, may be call it the programming workflow paradigm?). May be it comes with a really strong debugger tooling that’s constantly giving you feedback on what your code is actually doing. Think REPL on steroids. I can imagine there would be challenges with parsing/evaluating incomplete code syntax and functions. So I guess, the whole compiler/translator side has to be thought out from the ground up as well.
Disclaimer: There’s a good chance I simply don’t know what I’m talking about because I’m no language designer or even close to understanding how programming languages and it’s ecosystems are created. Just sharing some thoughts I had as a junior dev back in the day.
I’m not sure that what developers really, really need is faster programming cycles. Most teams could benefit more by controlling the process - from idea to deployed. How much technical debt is incurred because users/customers can’t prioritize features or give accurate requirements, there’s way too much WIP, features are huge, releases are huge and infrequent and the feedback cycles are far too long.
So yeah, as programmers it’s always cool to look at ways to program faster, but what’s the point in programming stuff nobody needs faster? Or programming the wrong things faster?
I’d be willing to be that if you asked any team, “What are the biggest impediments to delivering value to your users faster?”, the answer would be that you can’t cut code fast enough.