
Ask HN: 5 years from now; what do devs do? - usgroup
1. What languages do they write in?<p>2. Which stacks do they use?<p>3. What hardware is king?<p>4. Why software is king?<p>5. What are they developing?
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dasmoth
_Languages:_ Lots of Javascript ( _maybe_ more Typescript, but would be
shocked if that had taken over completely). Probably quite a bit of Python,
Ruby, Go, PHP. I'd be pretty shocked if something we haven't already heard of
gains a big market share in five years. New languages are a slow-burn thing
today. One plausible shift would be Rust edging out C/C++ in lower-level
application/library development. But will be a slow transition, as a fraction
of total code written, it'll still be quite small.

 _Stacks:_ I suspect we'll see more emphasis on making new-built software that
can be sold to management as "cloud aware". Which in practice, probably
translates to more Kubernetes. But again, mostly stuff we're seeing today.

 _Hardware_ : amd64 still dominant for servers and desktops. ARM for mobile,
gradually making some inroads into the server space (but if it takes over
completely, that's still >5 years off). Maybe some ARM desktops. Hopefully
POWER will be hanging in there, and maybe some RISC-V hardware -- but only in
niches. Number of cores will continue to increase, but addressable RAM and
memory bandwidth will be even bigger limiting factors than they are today.

 _What are they developing?_ : Line-of-business CRUD apps.

 _Edit:_ Re-reading, this comes across as quite negative. I _do_ think we'll
see a whole lot of innovation in these areas -- just that it'll take multiple
years to filter through to what the average developer is working on.

~~~
usgroup
To your hardware section I'd add the rise and rise of the GPU, and possibly
FPGA in scientific computing.

In terms of "what". I expect these transitions to continue strongly:

Backend -> Data Engineering

Backend -> Machine Learning

Analytics -> Data Science

I expect something like WASM to up-end front-end development totally at some
point, maybe in the next five years, possibly leading to "web desktops" that
run true "web applications".

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CM30
1\. The same variety of languages they use now. Remember, most
developers/engineers are not 'trendy'. Most companies are not on top of the
latest trends and fad frameworks.

So while there will be inevitably be a fair few using completely new languages
and frameworks we can't even currently imagine, there will also be people
using the exact same stuff they're using now, or have been using for decades.
We'll have people still using React and Angular and Vue. People still using
PHP and MySQL and .NET and Python. Hell, some people will still likely be
using Cobol or Fortran or assembly code 5 years from now. Hell, some people
will be writing ASM in 2050.

2\. Every type of stack imaginable today, plus various others created in the 5
years from now. There are still many devs out there using Apache and a LAMP
stack for their work, likely even with CPanel or Plesk still running on it to
boot.

3\. Don't have much experience with hardware, so won't guess about that.

4\. What kind of software are you speaking of? The kind the dev uses to write
code, or the kind that runs on the server/servers? For the former, probably
Visual Studio Code or Brackets or what not, with Git for version control and
Mac OS/Windows/some Linux distro as the operating system. Don't see much of
that stuff being replaced any time soon.

5\. Exactly what they're developing now. 99.9% CRUD apps and sites for
businesses, 0.01% more interesting things for startups and FANG companies.

Hope that doesn't come across as too negative, it's just that from my
experience, people always assume the future is going to be far more different
than it actually is and that tech will be uniformly replaced in some major
revolution. That's usually not how it works. Usually it's the old and new co
existing, and both tech and business models being unevenly distrubuted among
people and organisations.

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thedevindevops
_Languages_ : If framework bloat hasn't hit the global reset button on front-
end development, something new in that space. .Net Core ~7 should be out by
then. More Python. More Rust. Less PL/SQL(Oracle) & Java(Oracle) due to the
licence issues. Possibly a lot more Java(Open source).

 _Stack_ : In ~5 years we should be in the peak of the performance focus sine
wave, moving away from microservices to tighter, more responsive
architectures. In an ideal world devices like Google Glass will finally become
mainstream and require the supporting developer resources to leverage them.

 _Hardware_ : Nothing that will affect the average developer but I'm hoping
some niche applications will have access to synthetic neuron cpus.

 _Software_ : is _always_ king.

 _What_ : I hope the hype from machine learning/advanced memorisation will
have died down (but still have it's place) though mostly replaced with clever
and considered algorithms built by what will probably be a new job title that
is a hybrid of data scientist and software architect - what computer
scientists should have been doing all along.

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veddox
Five years is too little to expect much change in any of these departments -
possibly apart from the stack (which seems to change every six months...)

