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Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#51

Post by someguy101010 »

belltaco wrote: post #28
genidoi wrote: post #23

A search engine that produces results you would find interesting/helpful/engaging most of the time. It should heavily penalize SEO optimized, clickbaity listicle trash. Content that was created organically as part of a conversation should rank very highly if it's relevant to the query, as well as blog posts from obscure but highly relevant and informed sources. Google died when they stopped being well informed librar…

This does not seem like a software engineering improvement.

It would improve it for me, but only because I'm a glorified google search monkey

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#52

Post by js4ever »

RNeff wrote: post #50

Develop a methodology for writing correct software. No bugs, guaranteed.

Would you agree to spend 5 to 10 more time and budget to write a software in exchange for the no bugs guarantee? I have thinked a lot about this and my conclusion is that this requirement is foolish when you compare it to the cost/time drawback.

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#53

Post by salt-licker »

A programming language with Python-like syntax and a Hindley-Milner type system plus typeclasses. Basically, we bring Haskell’s type system an imperative programming language. An easy-to-learn scripting language with a strong, sound type system with reliable type inference will reduce bugs in codebases of every size across the industry.

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#54

Post by shadycuz »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #12

I seem to spend far more time on the deployment of code than I ever used to, more time writing CloudFormation and ansible than the Java backend, python lambdas and static UI that it deploys. That seems nuts to me. I'm not sure how you fix it without being Amazon/Google. People moan about Terraform too before that gets mentioned.

I was actually just talking to a friend the other day about starting a company to solve this for fortune 500's.

Nothing radical. Just a managed service provider that would build and maintain the CI/CD pipeline for them.

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#55

Post by simonw »

Development environments. The amount of time and hassle I've seen lost to getting a working development environment up and running is incredible.

Every time I talk to someone who's learning to program I tell them: "Setting up your development environment will be a nightmare. I have been doing this for twenty years and it's STILL a nightmare for me every time I do it. You are not alone."

Docker is reasonably good here... except you have to install Docker, and learn to use Docker Compose, and learn enough of the abstractions that you can fix it when something breaks.

https://glitch.com/ is by far the best step forward I've seen on this problem, but it's relatively limited in terms of what you can accomplish with it.

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#58

Post by dfabulich »

belltaco wrote: post #26

>What's the most important piece of technical debt across software engineering, that could practically be solved if we put enough energy into it? Being able to update libraries, tools etc. automatically and without friction. Right now upgrading is so tedious, error prone and painful that most places just keep using ancient versions that are not only lacking bug fixes and newer features but are a huge attack surface.

What if the new version has a bug?

Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

#59

Post by Ididntdothis »

js4ever wrote: post #52
RNeff wrote: post #50

Develop a methodology for writing correct software. No bugs, guaranteed.

Would you agree to spend 5 to 10 more time and budget to write a software in exchange for the no bugs guarantee? I have thinked a lot about this and my conclusion is that this requirement is foolish when you compare it to the cost/time drawback.

It’s conceivable to have a language or markup where you can specify on more detail what the code should do. This could then be checked automatically. Things are already going in that direction with things like non-nullable but I am pretty sure this could be taken much further.
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