What makes software hard is the messiness of the human real world: time zones, keyboard layouts, languages, Unicode, GDPR, SOX compliance, etc, etc.
Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
31–40 of 364 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#32Decent 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.
This seems like an antigoal to me. Abstracting away infrastructure just means it will become increasingly centralized as a commodity and less likely/harder to create independent services.
I don’t necessarily agree.
Look at n2n or userbase, they’re open source and can be self hosted.
Other nocode tools can follow suit, and can be federated.
I agree with the other comment that this can have the same effect as the one Excel had during the past decades (there are companies running completely on Excel).
At the moment though, the tools feel too limited.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#33>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.
That is not known to have a solution. It's a human coordination and cooperation problem on a global scale.
Take the people (and LAWYERs) out of the equation and software becomes much simpler.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#34Decent 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.
If we don't take software engineers as a fixed population, but rather everyone on Earth with sufficient intelligence to code well with the right no-code framework (which currently doesn't exist), then this is indeed the biggest priority. Of course, I am under no illusion that no code will work for everything, such as developing ML applications from scratch. Even then, it can be a way to interface with pre-built ML ap…
Salesforce got it partially right. To be somewhat cynical, the trick is to enable no-code, but (a) make it just borderline user-hostile enough that you foster an entire marketplace of no-code consultancies to no-code for companies too busy and frustrated to no-code themselves, and (b) ensure everything is extensible with actual code. They got (a) balanced perfectly, but (b) is somewhat lacking, and it didn't have to be. Someone who builds the no-code-but-you-can-drop-to-code consulting network will be the next Salesforce + Oracle combined, and will empower a lot of people around the world.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#35Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#36Ignoring hard problems like memory safety and parallelization (let's say), I think the biggest soft problem that I experience is optimizing the amount of time spent doing work relative to setting up boilerplate - mainly during web programming, i.e. it took me literally a few days to work out how to use code from and deploy node_modules without cheating.
Not trivial but maybe automated by some meta-meta-build tool?
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#37A computer and OS that boots in 100ms. Every user action gives a response in 10ms.
As an example of just how far we are from this, generally the bootloader hasn't even passed off to the OS within the first 100ms.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#38I would create a cross-platform GPU-targeted GUI framework for .NET Core. Something like Avalonia, only without skia, directly on top of D3D11, GL, GLES or Metal. Modern GPUs are awesome, can directly render very complicated vector graphics. Outside Windows not used for GUI despite there's need for that, slow mobile CPUs + very high rez displays are both common.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#39Formally specify all the commonly used languages, runtimes and APIs, so that we could translate programs between them. Then make sure that all programs such translated can be compiled, so that we don't waste resources by running inefficient VMs.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#40There's too many damn libraries