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

(That and the 800lb gorilla in the room: programmers are fashion-driven to the point of absurdity.)

Except, thinking about it, I don't think it fits your description because it can't be solved by the methods you describe. We are "complexity junkies". Most of us haven't hit rock bottom, don't see a problem, or are well-paid to feed our habit.

We have tools and concepts that would do the trick, but we ignore them.

Consider Elm lang. Takes all the complexity out of writing web apps, has a history of zero bugs in the code it generates, doesn't get traction because...?

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Dr. Margaret Hamilton (of Apollo 11 fame, who coined the phrase "software engineering") developed a system of software construction she called "Higher-Order Software" that eliminates the sources of most programming bugs. Sadly, it was critically panned and has languished in obscurity for decades. See "System Design from Provably Correct Constructs" for more info.

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Graydon Hoare gave a talk on the history of compilers[1] and he doesn't mention Prolog once. Is it possible he doesn't know about the research into logic programming and compilers?

E.g. "Parsing and Compiling Using Prolog" Jacques Cohen and Tim Hickey ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 9(2):125-163 · April 1987 DOI: 10.1145/22719.22946 · Source: DBLP https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220404296_Parsing_a...

    1. Introduction
    2. Parsing
        2.1 Bottom-Up
        2.2 Top-Down
        2.3 Recursive Descent
    3. Syntax-Directed Translation
    4. M-Grammars and DCGs
    5. Grammar Properties
    6. Lexical Scanners And Parser Generation
    7. Code Generation
        7.1 Generating Code from Polish
        7.2 Generating Code from Trees
        7.3 A Machine-Independent Algorithm for Code Generation
        7.4 Code Generation from a Labelled Tree
    8. Optimizations
        8.1 Compile-Time Evaluation
        8.2 Peephole Optimization
    9. Using Proposed Extension
    10. Final Remarks

Long story short, if you want to write a compiler it's easier and faster to learn Prolog and write it in that than to learn to write a compiler in whatever lower-level language you might already know.

[1] https://thenewstack.io/rust-creator-graydon-hoare-recounts-t...

1) Why unguessable? That sounds like something one would naively use to keep secrets, but encryption is the right tool for that. Apart from that, it sounds like nodes participating in the network would inherently have to see names in order to process requests...

Would something like 256 or 512 bit hashes suffice? You can try to guess or enumerate, but the chances of finding anything are slim.

2) What problems of networked data storage would this end? I see lots of problems, such as discoverability, bandwidth, latency, retention, scaling, censorship, etc. Which of these are solved by globality of the netwokr? Which of these are solved by unguessable addresses?

3) How does this end copyright? AIUI copyright is a social problem, not an engineering problem. If you want to work around it, you would need (at least) strong anonymity and censorship resistance. Freenet is the only thing (that I know of) that comes close, and while it has engineering problems, the main issue with any such project is a people problem: you need huge adoption, otherwise it is impossible to resist deanonymization and offer sufficient bandwidth & storage, etc.

I can think of 2 ripe opportunities, that I reference often.

1. Comments integrated with code as associated records that can overlap, which provides context, not merely inlined comments. The state of understanding code is horrendously inefficient by design.

2. Put a more type safe language on the browser with concurrency primitives. Promises are a hack improvement and Python is too rigid in ideology to make it eventially compatible.