December: What technological innovation I'm looking forward to

[jack]

I could have found an answer that fitted this question and yesterdays question both, but I decided they were interesting in different ways.

Technological innovations I think we're groping towards, which I'm impatient to have already:

A programming language with a syntax as straightforward as python, but works like C++14 is trying to, of letting it all compile to blazing fast code, even for embedded systems, by default, but letting you easily use dynamic typing where you actually want it. And of letting you use static type checking MOST of the time, but lets you be as dynamic as you need when you actually need it.

Widespread 3D printing of replacement parts, etc. We're nearly there, but we're waiting for a slightly wider variety of materials, and a wider database of possible things. Where you can say "I want this £10 widget holder from the supermarket, but can I get one 30% longer if I pay extra? OK? Thank you!"

Private cars replaced by mega-fleets of robot taxis and universal good public transport throughout/between all population dense areas.

Everyone uses git, or another dvcs, and the interface is actually consistent and friendly for everybody.

Decent, standardised, change-tracking and formatting for non-plain-text documents that allows sensible merging. (OK, this seems to be two steps forward and three steps back, so maybe there's no point waiting for it, but I'd still like it! :))

Comments

[andrewducker]

Oh, and Git is perfectly friendly, so long as you use an interface other than the command-line.

And I use Word all the time to do change-tracking and formatting, with merging. Seems to work ok.

[jack]

Git is perfectly friendly, so long as you use an interface other than the command-line.

I need to actually try this. I think "non-friendly" is related to several different things: one is people who don't grok command lines at all; one is the fact that the syntaxes to the command line tools are invariably inconsistent with each other in ways designed to make common tasks simple, but prevent easily generalising syntax; one is that it works on a somewhat different mental model to previous VCS (so people who are experience with SVN etc sometimes find it HARDER than someone who's never used VCS at all); one is that you can do quite complicated things but there may not always be a "right" way to do them. I'm not sure if you can fix all those things at once (but hopefully...)

[andrewducker]

The underlying model that git uses is actually quite simple, so once you understand that, working out what you want to do is easy enough.

The problem is the command line - and you can easily avoid that by using a tool like Eclipse (or various others).

[jack]

I use Word all the time to do change-tracking and formatting, with merging. Seems to work ok.

It does seem to have got better, I don't really have any experience of it, so it's likely it works better than I fear. Partly, even if it works technically, there still seems to be a big problem with people who don't, or can't, use it correctly, and documents with inconsistent versions, etc, etc getting emailed around... Partly, there seem to be lots of solutions for storing documents recording who changed what (like git for documents), but I've never heard anyone using one without swearing...

[andrewducker]

If the problem is "emailing documents of varying versions" then there's nothing you can do with a technological solution, except make people use it.

Git is text-only, which isn't very useful for merging documents that have any kind of complex syntax to them, or for adding comments to documents.

(You can use Github to do that with basic stuff, but it's not nearly as good as using Word's own "track changes" functionality.