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Comment by enkiv2 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe the software industry will discover constraint programming the way that it discovered functional programming over the past decade. If it did, that would almost immediately increase programmer productivity for non-performance-critical tasks (since the compiler could supply the implementation), while making formal methods more easily applicable to production code & supplying the prerequisites for more clever automatic code generation methods.

(In general, software engineers becoming vaguely aware of tech invented in the 1960s and 1970s is a huge productivity boon. If you, as a developer, want to impress your peers, you should take a couple hours to read what software engineers thought was obvious prior to 1980, when software engineers had a strong background in software engineering.)

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Any suggestions for sources on what was obvious prior to 1980? Happy to spend hours reading... but hours searching + reading adds up rapidly in a time-scarce environment.

> you should take a couple hours to read what software engineers thought was obvious prior to 1980

If you care about the subject this much and you think that everything was better before the 80s, then why don't you link to or name some sources you value?

An infinite loop of software trends :-)

To answer parent, I actually think better understanding of personality types and how manage people better will come with far better productivity.

The jungle of technology alternatives of how to solve business problems, causes a lot of unnecessary fights. It doesn't matter if you choose React, Angular or Vanilla JS. If your team is fighting each other, your team is not productive.

With this in mind, don't hire people that always agree with you, you always need someone to challenge you.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. The magic bullets are human factors from the interpersonal domain.

As someone who has used (and suffered at the hands of) NSLayoutConstraint, I'd actually love to see a more accessible and generally understandable version of this come into existence. Constraint programming is an underrated area of research at the moment, and I think it can be made so much more powerful by using what we've learned from building functional and declarative languages over the last decade.

These approaches did not fall out of favor because programmers were so much smarter, as you are implying. They fell out of favor because they were impractical at the time. Eaither because there was no language with critical odoption, the computers were not fast enough. The solutions had problems that the designers just assumed would be solved later, or the concepts did not survive their impact with reality.

I’ve been playing with CHR lately and it’s really dope. I’m not a big fan of prolog

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constraint_Handling_Rules

Time is a flat circle.

The industry oscillates. Each oscillation is a mirage that presents itself as a productivity gain but is in actuality an echo of the past.

Are the techniques we use today really more productive?

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