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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?

#61

Post by kabdib »

petters wrote: post #10

A computer and OS that boots in 100ms. Every user action gives a response in 10ms.

Well, the Atari ST booted in about one second, from black screen to moving a mouse around. A lot of that time was waiting for a floppy disk boot sector read to time out (so if you had a formatted floppy in the drive it'd spin up, quickly read a dud boot sector, and continue the boot process of the ROM-based OS rather than timing out).

I suppose if you were gonzo about it you could format the first track with sectors all numbered zero, and eliminate rotational latency. You'd save 80 ms (on average) that way.

Didn't seem worthwhile at the time :-)

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

#63

Post by zengid »

salt-licker wrote: post #53

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.

I'm not an expert, but that kind of sounds like F# (maybe not the typeclasses though?).

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

#66

Post by crispinb »

arexxbifs wrote: post #5

The 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.

It's pretty shocking that we are where we are in 2020. That year sounds like the future to me, but in computer interface terms it's definitely dystopia. The market failure to cap all market failures!

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

#67

Post by dkarl »

fires10 wrote: post #48
amiga_500 wrote: post #25

Removing out of date and incorrect advice on c++ from the internet.

As someone trying to learn c++ this would be great.

If you get a job at a company that uses C++, you will probably need some of that outdated information.

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

#68

Post by t-writescode »

simonw wrote: post #55

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…

And then after using Docker, sometimes you need to figure out how to get your debugger and IDE to talk inside the docker container, which has .. varying levels of success depending on the language.

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

#69

Post by dane-pgp »

A piece of technology that seems to be missing is a global decentralised anonymous identity and trust framework. It probably requires a leap of engineering comparable to the invention of the blockchain (although I don't think that a blockchain is necessarily the model to follow here, since the data should be encrypted).

Every website and app and network service seems to be reinventing the wheel here, and end up creating little silos of trust data, whereas in principle it should be possible to receive a (locally) consistent answer to the question of "Is this person in good standing with the other humans they interact with?" whether that person is sending you an email, or writing a software library you are downloading, or creating an account on your website, or selling you goods on Ebay, or offering you a lift through a ride sharing app.

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

#70

Post by fmjrey »

What matters most is what you want to still be there when the power goes off: data.

No amount of processing power matters if you don't have the data.

Everyone in the industry focuses too much on the processing side: objects, functions, containers, VMs, k8s, etc. but nobody really gives proper attention to data, its provenance, where it stays and where it goes, etc. I'm not saying engineers don't think about these things, they obviously have to think about it at some point. It's just that data is always accessory to the story. It's like processing is the cool kid and data is the stinky one nobody wants to approach unless you have to. Look at the 12 factor principles for example, where is data in there? How easy is it to take data from one place/cloud/database to another? Data is the raw material, it needs to be the primary concern in programming languages and architectures, not objects or functions, containers or whatever, those come after, not first.

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