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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?

#161

Post by thrower123 »

dfabulich wrote: post #90

We 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…

I do miss that brief window when sites would have mobile-friendly views where they would give you a de-shitted basic HTML-only view if they detected you were using a mobile client. Then 4G happened, and certain markets got wireless data that was on par with what most desktops got through their cable internet, and it was over.

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

#162

Post by leppr »

keenmaster wrote: post #24
ronyfadel wrote: post #20

Decent 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…

> It would also make its creators obscenely rich.

How? If you want a language to be adopted and become standard, it would have to be free and open-source. You don't get "obscenely" rich from that.

This is a good example of those problems that could relatively easily be solved with a proper public-goods funding mechanism, but very difficultly without.

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

#163

Post by alangibson »

On the meta level, I want a tool that shows me the wasted time and resources in my business' development pipeline, all the way from idea to delivery. There are endless numbers of tools that will spit out metrics that no one knows how to interpret, but I want a tool that gives me actionable advice on specific things my teams can do to increase their throughput and reduce lead times and work in progress.

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

#165

Post by CamperBob2 »

amasad wrote: post #148
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Repl.it and taught my daughter python there. Can you please make a self hosted version? I think the only thing I've seen is that maybe sometime in the future you'll have it.

Great to hear :-) Certainly the plan. Just a matter of priorities and time. I'm curious, what's so attractive about self hosted version?

As long as my critical infrastructure and tools depend on someone else's computer, I'm nothing more than a (potentially well-paid) sharecropper.

In fact, I think that's a valid answer to the question posed by the headline. Returning the power to the end user, and keeping it there, should be the most important priority for software developers. This is a social problem, not an engineering problem, but unlike many other social problems the solution will have to be engineering-driven.

In more concrete terms, that means being able to self-host your tools.

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

#166

Post by globular-toast »

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…

Why are you setting up new dev environments all the time? I have my dotfiles on github and they're always ready to go on any new Linux system I happen to be on. I have to initially set up new tools, of course, but once it's done it's done.

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

#167

Post by thrower123 »

I would somehow fix software engineering training so that people understood the vast corpus of techniques and approaches that have been tried, what the pros and cons of them were, and what the reactions to those issues were. Less on the theoretical algorithmic level, but on the practical and implementation level.

We should not be rewriting and adopting a slightly better but incompatible version of make every five years, or waffling between SQL and NoSQL, or churning back and forth between slightly different versions of MVC paradigms. Or going from tables to div-tables to flow layouts to css-grid.

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

#169

Post by zozbot234 »

ijpsud wrote: post #159
dane-pgp wrote: post #69

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 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…

Just post a bond that is forfeited if you engage in verifiable abuse, the proceeds of which are used to compensate the victims (if applicable). Use pseudonymous identity to link any number of site-specific "identities" to that same initial posting. Real-name identity can then be optional (although some sites may still insist on it), but users in good standing are protected from "sybil" attacks because each entirely-new user requires posting a separate bond, so the cost quickly becomes infeasible.
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