My kingdom for a technology that lets me write an app once and run it acceptably on Android, iOS and in the browser. This probably beats everything else listed in this thread in terms of developer hours saved.
Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
151–160 of 364 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#152We need a faster web framework that generates HTML on mobile phones with no JS on the main thread. The web is the "single top-priority" software platform, but it's in big, big trouble. On mobile, users spend less than 7% of their time on the web. https://vimeo.com/364402896 All of the rest of their time is in native apps, where big corporations decide what you are and aren't allowed to do. As a result, the money is g…
How do you feel about JS frameworks like NextJS [1], Razzle [2], and Gatsby [3]? They try to reduce the bundle and first times to paint and interactions.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#153Having my phone as my ultimate CPU, immediately connectable to commodity peripherals (monitor, keyboard, printers) at home, office and on the street. Content would be stored on the phone following the "local fist" principle to favor speed and security. Something like Ubuntu Edge for those who remember it, but with more local storage -- TBs maybe -- more connectivity out of the box.
Yeah I'd love to just dock my phone into a desktop setup.
Not sure why this doesn't exist for Apple/Android. It seems so obvious that they're must be Some critical flaw I'm overlooking
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#154Development 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…
This is my calling. I'm the cofounder of Repl.it and I've dedicated my career to solving this problem. Simon -- since you're the cocreator of Django, you might get a kick out of this: From loading up a Django environment to adding and rendering the first view takes less than a minute: https://gifs.amasad.repl.co/django.gif Before starting this company I was a founding engineer on the React Native team where I focused…
Thank you for your hard work!
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#155Development 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…
dotfiles help a lot here, they should have them for more things
npm & git's local directory awareness is a lifesver
rvm / nvm are great when the shell integration is turned on, direnv is wonderful
gap seems to be with native packages -- there isn't one of these for brew / apt-get, and language-level package managers fail on these deps a lot
inability to map local hostnames to docker is also a problem -- that would make it easier to manage multiple environments at once
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#156My kingdom for a technology that lets me write an app once and run it acceptably on Android, iOS and in the browser. This probably beats everything else listed in this thread in terms of developer hours saved.
In theory Flutter allows you to do that. (With the caveat that you have to write a ton of custom code due to the lack of libraries).
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#157IMHO, making WebAssembly fully and tightly integrated with browsers like JS is today will be the next big leap forward. In such a way that you won't need to use JS at all - direct access to DOM and other Web APIs, choice to use whatever programming language you want
Java applets came 20 years too early - potentially had the power to do everything we do with the web today but 10x faster and more cleanly.
The web remains one place where you lack the freedom to easily use whatever language you like - WASM will end the era of JS if they do it right.
The JS ecosystem is extremely wild and turbulent - even something as simple as "I need this project to be built exactly as it was in August 2017" is almost impossible with the npm world.
Meanwhile native apps compiled in 1985 still run, and can even build today with minimal fuss.
Lets be honest - how many of you use JS because there was no other option? Its not a terrible language - in fact I like JS/ES7 more than python, but it's still one of the pillars of chaos in the world of programming
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#158A 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.
Disagree about scripting.
Compile times are fast if you are willing to tradeoff performance. But you can decide whether you whether or not you want a long compile fast program, a short compile slow program, or an interactive compiler.
The example I can give is StandardML. You have SML/NJ and MLTon as two possible compilation options among other. SML/NJ has an interactive mode. MLTon compiles for longer but results in faster programs. (And it's also Hindley-Milner)
Just going to the "it should be interpretable" route without there being any option for whole-program optimization at compile time results in unnecessary bloats in performance which by all means we can avoid now as development hardware has become faster.
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#159A 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 creat…
I was talking about this with a friend the other day. I don't know about the technical feasibility (RE sybil attack[0]), but if it were possible, it would have a massive impact on the web. The current state of the art (in terms of new user signup) is using phone numbers as representing unique "trustable" people, which is kind of absurd.
This reminds me of how social security numbers weren't originally intended to be used as unique identification, but the demand for some form of identification was so strong that organisations ended up hackily using it anyway.[1]
Re: Ask HN: What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?
#160Documentation. 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…
Hey there, I'm actually currently working on something in the documentation space that will benefit both companies and open source projects.
Would love to chat with you further! Shoot me an email over if you're interested at li.eric00@gmail.com