Ask HN: 5 years from now; what do devs do?
1. What languages do they write in?
2. Which stacks do they use?
3. What hardware is king?
4. Why software is king?
5. What are they developing?
2. Which stacks do they use?
3. What hardware is king?
4. Why software is king?
5. What are they developing?
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.
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".
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.
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.