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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?

#131

Post by ijpsud »

amasad wrote: post #117
darzu wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dream is a "Open in VSCode" button on each GitHub repo that would create a container dev environment (either locally or hosted), and that environment would be ready to run all test, CI, localhost etc. You could trivially create a new environment to test out someones PR or work on a feature branch, etc. If you use hosted environments, then you could connect from any client. If you only have a web browser, then you…

We've made something similar at Repl.it -- we call it "Repl from Repo". It's far from running everything but it can run a lot: https://repl.it/blog/github We tried to make it as seamless and as low configuration as possible. Our "run on repl.it" badge is currently growing exponentially on GitHub.

Great work on this. Is it open source? Or is there a way to use my own hardware? If not, then it seems like gitpod.io[0] is a much better fit for the open source ecosystem. That said, there's definitely a place for proprietary software in this space (I'm a Glitch user and I love it).

[0] https://www.gitpod.io/

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

#132

Post by cweagans »

detaro wrote: post #102
cweagans wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is definitely not near the top of my list when I think of things that get in my way on a day-to-day basis, but I'm genuinely curious about how/why it is for you. I can't remember the last time I waited for my computer to start from a cold boot (updates apply in the middle of the night and the reboot happens then). It wakes up from sleep quick enough for me, and pretty much anything I click on or type responds fa…

This probably isn't quite what the commenter had in mind, but boot time matters a lot for embedded devices. It's quite possible the "Linux box" you cold boot the most is the center console of your car.

That's a really great point: I'd love the infotainment system in my car to boot faster. But that is also not "the single top-priority software engineering problem" for me, either.

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

#133

Post by pjc50 »

petters wrote: post #10

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

Boot time is kind of ireelevant when everything spends its time asleep. But I strongly agree that we should try to reduce frame latency for "productivity" apps; you probably don't need 10ms as most people are still on 60Hz, but we ought to be able to manage two or three frames.

At least get typeahead working properly again. Various places have borken this, especially Facebook, but back on vt3270 systems experienced operators could just hammer a bunch of data into forms as fast as they could type. Can't usually do that with web apps.

I've used a Tempest arcade machine with near-zero latency, and it was a very weird and pleasant experience.

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

#134

Post by ampdepolymerase »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #111

End to end validation of complex systems. Cookie-cutter developers using open source they don't understand to implement mission critical infrastructure for companies that don't understand the internet. Its a recipe for disaster.

Pay math majors to manually (or with software assistance to help maintain rigor) prove the correctness of open source software Infosys-style. Get paid by enterprise customers. You don't need math majors per se just people with some math talent. Unfortunately there are tons of mathematically inclined people in the world, much more than there are opportunities so you can probably hire e.g. 10 proofs engineers in Eastern Europe/Iron Curtain countries (Soviet style math education while brutal, is tremendously effective) for the cost of one SV Engineer. Companies like Galois may be nice but they are expensive and don't scale very well; industrial automation and IoT hardly have the same margins as overpaid defence contractors. Training humans in TLA+ is cheaper. For example in Kazakhstan and Ukraine, Pascal is widely taught as part of the high school curriculum. Boeing can verify the output of their HCL outsourcing by an army of Slavic engineers trained in Ada Spark (which is not too dissimilar syntax-wise to Pascal [0]). Namecheap managed to train an entire customer service team in Eastern Europe on the finer details of DNS and networking technologies. All this on razor thin margins of selling domain names. It is not unimaginable to scale this to formal verification. Considering that GitHub acquired Semmle, this field will explode in the near future.

[0]: See also: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-48753-0_16

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

#135

Post by amasad »

ijpsud wrote: post #131
amasad wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've made something similar at Repl.it -- we call it "Repl from Repo". It's far from running everything but it can run a lot: https://repl.it/blog/github We tried to make it as seamless and as low configuration as possible. Our "run on repl.it" badge is currently growing exponentially on GitHub.

Great work on this. Is it open source? Or is there a way to use my own hardware? If not, then it seems like gitpod.io[0] is a much better fit for the open source ecosystem. That said, there's definitely a place for proprietary software in this space (I'm a Glitch user and I love it). [0] https://www.gitpod.io/

Much of the component pieces are open-source, as I mention in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22278301

And the goal is to get to open-source most, if not all of it.

Is GitPod fully open-source? AFAICT you still need to buy a license to self-host.

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

#136

Post by fsloth »

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…

Visual studio works really well with C++ and .net languages. The defaults are fairly reasonable. Of course if defaults don’t suffice it’s back again to painland.

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

#137

Post by aosmith »

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 let's not even get started on docker for mac volume mounts. My linux machine (that's not allowed anymore) is literally 10x faster for local dev.

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

#138

Post by juststeve »

drusepth wrote: post #92
petters wrote: post #10

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

Would you mind expounding on why this is important, and/or why you chose those specific timings?

not op but everything feels sluggish. Waiting for all the latency everywhere - over years/decades - feels really draining. i.e slow websites, slow desktop apps, slow languages, slow OS updates, slow IDEs, slow DB syncs, slow email clients.

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

#139

Post by closeparen »

A distributed database engine with the same semantics as single-node Postgres that's easy to operate reliably.

Cannot tell you how much time I spend fighting solved-since-1980 RDBMS problems at the application layer. But we really are too big for single-master (pushed it to its breaking point and a little beyond).

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

#140

Post by markbnj »

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 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.

I'd really like to understand more about what the pain points are here. In contrast to your experience I spend almost no time deploying code. We commit, tests run, we click a button and the deployment is updated in our kubernetes cluster. We did have to put a fair bit of work into our gitlab pipelines and the tooling that patches config into our kubernetes manifests and depoys them to the right place (let's say 2 person months all-in), but the payoff in the end was pretty significant. We're a fairly small company so if we could afford to put the time in to build the foundation for painless deployment I wonder what prevents larger orgs from doing this work? Is it access to the right skills? Difficulty prioritizing non-revenue tasks?

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