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

Someone upthread said "nocode", and I think that's more on the money. Most people will never be "programmers" as we understand the term, but they could still benefit from a narrowing of the gap between what Excel can do and what (say) Python can.

An old hobby project of mine[1] had a go at this by letting spreadsheet users write functions in the spreadsheet itself, in exactly the same way they already used the spreadsheet to calculate things. Basically, if you just used the spreadsheet as a calculator, it would automatically define reusable functions out of those calculations. I think something like that would push Excel's power and usability forward for your average person, because it wouldn't make them reliant on programmers to implement the things they want.

1: http://6gu.nz

Far too often when I want to learn something new I either find there is not much documentation or find that there is a large mass of documentation that probably has everything I need but is so disorganized that I can't figure out how to approach it.

Another documentation problem, especially with open source projects, is that development and documentation are often loosely coupled, if at all. The people doing documentation usually don't have the resources to keep up with development, and so even if there is good well organized comprehensive documentation it is usually obsolete.

With the Universal Package Manager (https://github.com/replit/upm) we're trying to encode the best practices in package management behind a single easy-to-use interface. One of the most fun features is that you can `import` or `require` a package and we'll just guess what you want to do, install the dependencies for you, generate a spec and lock file.

With prybar (https://github.com/replit/prybar) we're trying to create a universal interactive programming experience that behaves roughly the same for every language.

And, to be open-sourced soon, our window-tiling manager and workspace (https://repl.it/blog/ide), we're trying to build a framework that makes it so easy to build complex, plugin-based environments, such as IDEs, very easy to build.

We also leverage a lot of awesome open-source projects and standards, like the Language Server Protocol by VSCode/Microsoft, that abstract over language features and makes it easy to provide an amazing experience across languages.

Edit: if it's been a few months since you tried Repl.it, give it another try, we've made a lot of progress since then. Multiplayer is now out of beta, we have Git integration, and we've done a lot to make it faster and more reliable.

10ms response is a bit on the fast side. Aside from pros doing sports or music, we (humans) don’t register most kinds responses that fast. Plus a 60hz display is 16ms anyway. These days browsers, editors, and OSes really do usually try to meet this goal for the most common workflows, though there are plenty of demonstrable exceptions. It’s a good goal, I agree with it, but maybe 100ms would be a more reasonable worst-case response time?