Dave Thomas gave the keynote speech (link) about how technology seems to change all around us just to show up the same, old problems over and over again.
Things that I took home:
- In the future, queries will me more important than languages
- Big data is big
Some comments from me:
How often were you irritated by how source code from someone else looked? I don’t mean sloppy, I mean indentation or how they place spaces and braces. In 2012, it should be possible to separate the model (source code) from the view (text editor) – why can’t my IDE simply show me the source in the way that I like and keep the source code in a nice, common format? (see Bug 45423 – [formatting] Separate presentation from formatting)
And how often have you wondered “Which parts of the code call Locale.getDefault() either directly or indirectly?”
How often did you need to make a large-scale change in the source code which could have been done with a refactoring in a few minutes – but writing the refactoring would have taken days because there simply are no tools to quickly write even simple refactorings in your IDE?
Imagine this: You can load the complete AST of your source code into a NoSQL database. And all the XML files. And the configuration files. And the UML. And everything else. And then create links between those parts. And query those links … apply a piece of JavaScript to each matching node …
Customers of my applications always want new business reports every day. It takes way too long to build these reports. It takes too much effort to change them. And it’s impossible to know whether a report is correct because no one can write test cases for them.
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