Build the tools and infrastructure necessary to make FPGA accelerator programming accessible to the average programmer. Moore's Law is mostly dead; we are getting more cores but we are not going to get significantly faster cores in the near future. What will bring us next big jump in computing performance is unclear but FPGA acceleration seems like one of the few promising directions.
Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
11–20 of 364 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#12I 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.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#13Artificial general intelligence
AGI has more to do with cognitive science and computational intelligence than strictly with software engineering but that's a good problem to be solved one day.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#14A computer and OS that boots in 100ms. Every user action gives a response in 10ms.
We had approximately that in the 1980s. And straight to a programmable shell, too.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#15effective batteries included declarative programming
Fulcro RAD is promising in this regard, going more declarative seems inevitable, there are challenges in designing declarative things though
I think collectively we need more thought on how to design declarative systems that are tangible inspectable debuggable in the same way following procedural code is
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#16The decline of usability, recognizability and coherence in desktop user interfaces. I honestly think we reached peak UX some time in the mid-90s. With the advent of touch devices, paradigms are mixing in a way that's directly hostile to productivity.
I agree with your take that mid-90's was probably peak UX. But I think that has more to do with that being about the time when companies stopped trying to strike a balance between accommodating both power users and casual users. Since then, much more effort has been put into providing a polished/slick UI at the expense of things like automation. Of course, that also plays into the advertising model which I believe is diametrically opposed to things like automation. (i.e. if you're not clicking/touching, they can't tell if you're looking at the ads)
Touch capabilities can be a nice addition to many types of desktop productivity software without detracting from what's already there. Companies reworking desktop applications to look and feel like mobile apps (with all of the related pros and cons) is what causes productivity to suffer rather than anything inherent in the paradigm.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#17effective batteries included declarative programming
Fulcro RAD is promising in this regard, going more declarative seems inevitable, there are challenges in designing declarative things though I think collectively we need more thought on how to design declarative systems that are tangible inspectable debuggable in the same way following procedural code is
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#18Training on a common ‘software engineering body of knowledge’. The state of the art is so different across organizations it’s like having medical tricorders at one place and leeches at another.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#19Only 2 things: Naming things, invalidating caches, and off-by-one errors.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#20Decent nocode, or some sort of nocode holy grail.
I want to be able to plug APIs together, process user input, have persistence and identity, without writing so much boilerplate.