Ask HN: What does the future hold for developers?

[drb311]

Asking for a friend...

1. What will change most for developers in the next 2 years?

2. How will the tech sector change in the next 5 years?

3. How will the world of 2020 be different from today?

4. What technologies emerging today will be pervasive in 2025?

This is not a test! Don't worry about being accurate. Please share what you believe is likely to happen over the next few years. I'm looking for a range of interesting, plausible ideas.

[segmondy]

1. For most developers nothing much will change, some will learn new languages and frameworks and think they discovered a new world, but it's the same ol' thing.

2. The tech sector would have cast it's vote on rust, either it has been adopted or it's just going to be a niche language. Elixir is going to be more popular than rust. Swift is going to be more popular than rust.

3. There will be new AI adaptations to Machine learning and Deep learning algorithms with fancier names, and we will hear that AI is still coming. General AI will still remain unrealized. Developers will be much more better, we will have generations of developers that learned software engineering from a young age and learned how to work with massive code base from a very young age. Awesome tooling for managing software complexity will exist.

4. Swift, PHP, Logical Languages will become popular again.

[awjr]

1) JavaScript is dying. Long live transpiling (typescript/babel/etc).

2) Internet of Things might finally realise it's full potential.

3) Open Data from Governments enabling companies and individuals to leverage value and deliver new services.

4) Surveillance, tracking, and behavioural prediction. Your phone, your car, your wallet, and your face all broadcast information. It just needs picking up, putting into a data lake and analysing. Expect better traffic management, intelligent congestion charging, and targeted arrests. All fed by advancements in IoT.

[drb311]

Thank you. Very exciting to see IoT, Big Data, Cloud and ML working together to comprehensively know, predict, and act on our every move.

Reminds me of the Guide MkII. We'll never quite know who it's working for.

[msimpson]

JavaScript is improving and will replace the need for Babel.

FTFY.

[contingencies]

1. A combination of public education and technically viable alternate funding streams will destroy VC/registered corporation modes of capital/motivation for a greater number of talented developers able to harness public interest. This is the biggest change: social.

2. The remote gig thing will begin to dissipate.

3. The Chinese RMB will be a global reserve currency and the Chinese international banking system will offer a viable alternative to SWIFT. More of the world will have adopted the IBAN, the US will still have its head in the sand. More people will leave western countries for the developing world, where overarching government surveillance and cost of living concerns do not encroach on daily life, and education and political stability have improved.

4. The biggest technology shift will be the mass adoption of wireless ad-hoc/mesh networking. The biggest losers will be mobile carriers and government surveillance, who will push hard politically to ban such direct communication between citizens by asserting that such communication is dangerous and that only terrorists and poor people have [this mode of] conversations.

[dirtyaura]

Virtual Reality - the quality of experience is already there and a lot of talented people working on VR apps. Totally new toolchains will emerge, but game programming background gives a head-start.

Deep learning is potentially the big breakthrough in AI and ML, already big companies are doing interesting stuff with it. Mastering deep learning will give you superpowers in coming years.

Mobile. Never downplay mobile. It has changed consumer market, but it has still a lot of opportunities especially in business side. There is no silver bullet for cross platform development, thus having native dev skills for iOS or Android will still be relevant in 5 years

[drb311]

Thank you. Agree we've not yet seen mobile do its thing on the business side. Slack platform looks like a step towards new paradigm for business software, first of many I guess?

Do you see AI and ML as core skills for developers in the future or will it remain a specialism? What % of developers will have some AI/ML related skill on their CV in 2025?

(Funny how in all this tech the CV refuses to go away.)

[jdmoreira]

I'll give my best... :)

1. Hardly anything will change. Maybe we'll start buying arm machines. Apple might also change from x86 to arm on laptops

2. Being a programmer will be much less glamorized. And we'll start to be blamed for half of world's problems

3. People will have multiple part-times. Remote jobs will start to be mainstream. A lot of people will do some hours a week for amazon turk and/or sharing economy businesses.

4. Our UIs/UX will be totally augmented with AI. Google glass on steroids. Also, our bodies will have a couple of sensors plugged-in. (Some people will still use emacs)

[insoluble]

> Being a programmer will be much less glamorized.

This is exactly what I am expecting more than perhaps any other significant change within this time-frame. When influential social programs try to push as many young people as possible into a specific set of professions, you can expect the value and glamour of those professions to decrease a substantial amount. Developers cannot possibly be immune to the principles of supply-and-demand. Naturally there will still be pockets of high value, but those pockets will grow ever more sparse.

[Raed667]

I think that by 2025 code-generation will become a big thing in CS. Most logic and UI will be drag-and-drop and all "coders" will have to do is to fine tune the business specific parts of the app.

[threesixandnine]

I heard this in 1991. They said it'll be available in 2000. Few more days and we'll be in 2016...

just saying....

[eecks]

1) In the next 2 years not much will change. Angular 2 will be released with TypeScript so as another comment said transpiling will become more popular.

2) Security will continue to be a popular topic. Privacy will be important and lots of apps (browsers/email/OSes) will push a privacy point of view.

4) By 2025 hopefully driving cars will become mainstream. With that I can see apps being built for these smart cars. Hopefully a viable alternative to Google will become more mainstream by then too.

[1123581321]

1. Front-end development won't involve much custom CSS.

2. You'll be able to raise seed money the way you apply online for a credit card.

3. Most underfunded institutions/infrastructures will either be shut down/abandoned or have a financially responsible maintenance/replacement plan in place. This includes US healthcare.

4. Home solar/battery with a reasonable ROI will be in every new construction or be a standard home improvement.

[ThrustVectoring]

I doubt number 2 - financing a start-up is much more like a hiring decision than a creditworthiness decision.

[drb311]

Thank you! I liked point 2. I guess that means you see a future with a lot more medium-scale start ups getting founded and funded? I'll look forward to that. :) Kickstarter already taking us that way, so it makes sense.

What do you think we'll have instead of custom CSS?

[staunch]

IMHO: You shouldn't have claimed to be "asking for a friend" when the reason for this post is clearly commercial.

[drb311]

Fair point. No deceit intended. I'll edit OP when at a computer. (Can't find edit option on phone.)

[cdnsteve]

1. Things like graphql for rest apis will be the standard. There will be more mature languages and tools than ever to choose from. Swift will see some uptake as a web language.

2. Competition will disrupt JS as the only front-end language.

3. 2020 well have standardized communication protocol for iot. Things can discover things near it and share/discover and interact.

4. Skynet.

[edimaudo]

What's the reason behind the question?

[drb311]

I'm managing editor at Packt. I want to understand what skills developers will need over the next few years, so that we can help them skill up today.

We want to empower all developers to do amazing things and help build the future.

The biggest danger for us isn't wrongly predicting something that doesn't happen, but missing something that DOES happen. I've been in Packt almost since the start. We were among the first to really spot Open Source CMSs and development frameworks. But I still have nightmares about how long it took us to appreciate the full implications of iOS and Android. :S

But of course this is also just a bit of fun. I hope it's just plain interesting for everyone.