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Comment by MichaelBurge | Hacker News Reader

It will probably be much the same as it is today. Styles will go in-and-out of fashion(today: OOP is not cool; FP is hip), but in 25 years I for one will probably be typing ASCII characters into a text editor, debugging with logs & debuggers & print statements, and using a command line.

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25 years ago it was much the same as it is today. In 1992 people were typing ASCII characters into a text editor and debugging with logs and print statements.

You can do so much more with a line of code now and there are so many more ways to make user interfaces, but the fundamental actions of the programmer are the same.

Fundamentally it's just a good level abstraction. Much like we still use writing for most communication even though we have audio and video options.

There seems to be a trend: As software increases in complexity, programming languages and frameworks become higher and higher level to combat these increases in complexity.

For example, think about how much more complex it is to develop an Android app versus a web app. All you need to write a web app is a text editor to create three files: an html file, a css file, and a js file. Android development on the other hand is so complicated that you need a fancy IDE to organize everything for you. My prediction for the future is that Android development (and mobile development in general) will eventually become this simple.

Those "higher level" tools are why you need a fancy IDE for android. Had they opted for simpler tools, more like swing then you could write an app with a couple of text editor files instead, just as you can do it for desktop apps today.

Android is actually the perfect example of adding tools to simplify development that end up making development much harder than it needs to be.

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