Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 364 posts

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

#201

Post by tyingq »

petters wrote: post #198
tyingq wrote: 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?

Yes, it's similar, but both hail from 2003. I would imagine some new clean sheet, not history encumbered, top-to-bottom framework would have value.

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

#202

Post by thom »

No idea where this fits on the priority list, but I think a lot of problems around stream processing still aren't solved, and it's holding us back from a really productive programming paradigm. Handling updates/retractions elegantly is hard or impossible on many platforms, handling late (sometimes _extremely_ late) data can be very inefficient. Working with complex dependencies between events (beyond just time-based windows), in realtime, can be really tough. As the saying goes, cache invalidation is one of the hardest problems in software engineering. Having a simple platform to represent processing as a DAG, but fully supporting both short and long term changes transparently would make event sourcing architectures trivial and extremely productive. The closest we've come seems to be:

https://github.com/frankmcsherry/differential-dataflow

Lots of very active CS research in this area though.

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

#203

Post by hoten »

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…

You should follow Surma. He's doing interesting work in this area (moving stuff off the main thread). https://twitter.com/DasSurma

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

#204

Post by sebastianconcpt »

Well if we have no restrictions on time and resources, then restricting ourselves to preserve the current statu quo of engineering is the wrong problem to takle.

I'd, instead, follow the Alan Kay idea of antecipating 10 years in the future with some new hardware that allows a new computing platform and then see how I can capitalize in it in some kind of pure way (removing as much technicalities as possible, like Self, LISP or Smalltalk did).

For inspiration on what form it could take, I'd take a look at all Sci-Fi I can but pay special attention to Bret Victor's: Humane Representation of Thought https://vimeo.com/115154289

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

#205

Post by z3t4 »

carapace wrote: post #171

In a word: complexity . (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,…

> programmers are fashion-driven to the point of absurdity.

On a certain level of abstraction, there is really no right or wrong, just different. And it becomes a matter of taste.

That and the limitations of the human brain. We cannot remember a billion assembly instructions, so we have to abstract, and create layers of abstractions in order to get to human level of tangibility. Only problem is that the more layers we pile on the more complex the stack becomes, and it get even more difficult to comprehend, so we get an exponential explosion of complexity. And the only thing limiting the complexity is hardware performance. So if computers keep getting faster we will be doomed.

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

#207

Post by Multicomp »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #165
amasad wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 othe…

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

I heartily agree. There are so many new tools and things that are interesting concepts, that I don't try because there is no offline/self-hosted version available.

Current example (but can be replaced by a myriad of other tools, this is not specific to 'em): Notion. Apparently could be adopted into my personal knowledge management, has some interesting features most of the software I've seen so far does not, but why would I ever invest even a moment of time to pay the costs of using the system (let alone the membership fees etc.) if one day, poof, it's gone, like Frank Sinatra, like WiiWare, like Microsoft eBooks, like Google Reader.

> Returning the power to the end user, and keeping it there, should be the most important priority for software developers.

This is what we need to return to. Look at the open-source manifestos, FSF documents, heck even certain sections in the Windows 9x User interface guides and .NET Framework design guidelines indicate that the user should always be the focus, the user should be the one in control.

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

#208

Post by RoyalPain »

Supermancho wrote: post #177

Some of these responses are high level stuff that ignores the day to day hurdles of most projects (validation of complex systems, wtf), some are right on the money. 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 desig…

A funny story with regards to the first point :

We have some legacy code at my work which is basically in "do not touch or it'll break" mode. Last year a senior developer who used to maintain it retired. Before he left, he copied the code into a PDF and annotated the PDF with his thoughts and advice. He didn't want to risk breaking the code on his last week by adding the comments directly to the code.

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

#210

Post by oneplane »

Quality Control in an automated fashion. While it does extend in to other areas, you can scope it to software engineering by having some sort of static analyser, sandbox with dynamic analyser and fuzzer in-a-box, that can you call at various stages. While it doesn't cover future found issues like the ones in the x86 ISA, it could prevent a lot of corner-cutting-by-managment and fix-it-in-prod mentality.

Once you get to a point where you can demonstrate that 'doing it faster' is not an option, everyone gets better for it.

Right now, all you get is bypassable CI pipelines, crappy in-IDE tools that sometimes work, and very costly static analysers that usually don't work and are more designed to please the clipboard warriors.

Post reply on HN