Developing on the Move


I am constantly amazed at the rate of progress in Software Development. Years ago, I recall writing tedious scripts using PERL, TCL and EXPECT to log into Switches and issue commands to provision them. Today we have Docker, Ansible, Kubernetes and a host of other tools, we have advanced compilers, transpilers, linters, formatters and various other tools. We can provision infrastructure on the cloud in seconds and then build complex systems quickly and efficiently. Obviously this means that the systems themselves can become ever more complex.

Computing power is such that AI now has practical applications, natural language processing, computer vision and other applications.

It occurred to me on my lengthy, rainy bus journey home this evening that the next step in our development evolution might be the ability to develop software and systems on the fly. I would love to be able to develop systems whilst I walked in the park or sat observing a lovely view. Would it be possible to talk to an interpreter and then run some process on the output to generate the code and the systems I am developing.

Presumably, we would need to define a language of common constructs that is extensible. Something like :


  • Project create
  • File create index javascript
  • Function create test
  • AWS Provision EC2

Each developer could then using some "modules" that where kept in a open-source repository run some parser on these instructions and produce some output, which would include code, in a language of their choice and DevOps in the technology of their choice. The system would need a language definition that could easily be extended 

Interested to hear the thoughts of others on this ...

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