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

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191–200 of 364 posts

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

#191
post #148

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?

It's a requirement for most of the US DoD (though that's changing). Which is where I work

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

#192
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…

I've been working on this for the last 3 year and at least solved the problem for myself. The crux is that there are about 100 programming languages, with a few frameworks each, and a couple of database solutions, with at least a dozen different versions of frameworks and databases that are used in parallel for app maintenance, and a few different platforms to run on. And on top of that developers like to customize their developer environment.

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

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, I wait almost a minute for my Chromecast to start every day.

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

#194

Understanding the problem. Most of the time the users haven't taken enough time to understand their own problems and have trouble articulating them in a way that's meaningful for a product manager or developer. And on the opposite side of that product managers and developers often do not develop sufficient domain experience to understand the problems users are trying to express. This is why the absolute best software…

Good point. But is not a computing or engineering problem. Is a cultural, education problem. People is using the languange poorly. If they can't articulate well then... all that is left is garbage in, garbage out.

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

#196
Some new software that matches what "Ruby on Rails" used to be would be welcome.

There are too many un-opinionated choices today, so people waste too much time on choices for the various pieces. The whole ecosystem is very fragmented.

A relatively sane, top-to-bottom framework that isn't the fastest, or "best", but "good enough"...would be welcome. Maybe Golang or Rust or Node will progress to having their own "Rails"?

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

#197
post #97
post #10

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

Modern lightbulbs don't even turn on in 100ms. I have a hard time believing sub second computer booting is really at the top of anyone's priorities.

I think it is important for embedded, but sure, not for mobile and desktop. App start time being instant is much more important.

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

#198
post #196

Some new software that matches what "Ruby on Rails" used to be would be welcome. There are too many un-opinionated choices today, so people waste too much time on choices for the various pieces. The whole ecosystem is very fragmented. A relatively sane, top-to-bottom framework that isn't the fastest, or "best", but "good enough"...would be welcome. Maybe Golang or Rust or Node will progress to having their own "Rails…

I never used RoR, but I thought Django is similar?

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

#199
post #70

What matters most is what you want to still be there when the power goes off: data. No amount of processing power matters if you don't have the data. Everyone in the industry focuses too much on the processing side: objects, functions, containers, VMs, k8s, etc. but nobody really gives proper attention to data, its provenance, where it stays and where it goes, etc. I'm not saying engineers don't think about these thi…

As someone in the hardware world where CPUs and fancy accelerators are all the rage, it's the same story when it comes to thinking about non-volatile memory (AKA NAND, Optane, PMem, etc.)

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

#200
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…

Nix is the closest I've come to this dream.

I like docker, but it's too resource heavy on a Mac. I need it running directly and not in a VM.

So a simple nix file, and nix-shell shebangs[1] has been life changing. Throw in --pure and now you really know the environment works everywhere.

My repos all have a shell.nix with every dependency. Just call nix-shell and it works in Linux and OSX. Anywhere.

You can even bundle it into a docker image and use nix in there too. For production, etc.

Documentation and tutorials are lacking, but if you put in some time, I've found nothing comparable.

Version it in, pin the Nix channel[2], and you can come back a year later in a brand new machine and start where you left off.

[1] https://gist.github.com/travisbhartwell/f972aab227306edfcfea

[2] Highly counterintuitive: if you don't pin a Nix channel, it's a moving target and dependencies may go missing, be updated, etc.

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