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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?

#231

Post by btown »

thom wrote: post #202

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…

When humans enter the mix, it becomes really complicated. Your event sourcing code can no longer look at events like "Human A changed the record with primary key B to have property C equal to D at time T" because that event is actually a function of the snapshot of how Human A saw the entire state of the interface at time T. And what if someone edited the record with primary key B to represent an entirely different entity (from the perspective of a rational human observer)? Is it still the case that a prior event on this record should be retroactively interpreted to affect the new identity? All code becomes recursively dependent on all prior code, and all events become recursively dependent on prior events. Figuring out how to code in a paradigm where you can't retire old code is very difficult and I'd welcome people pushing the envelope.

Martin Kleppman's articles and research is a great place to start for anyone interested: https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/02/11/database-inside-out-...

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

#232

Post by gdsdfe »

lame88 wrote: post #219

A constantly cycling proliferation of different languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. that all do the same things in a different way and are most often mutually incompatible with each other and have entirely different ecosystems with their own comparative advantages but also major pitfalls. This causes tech workers’ investment in skills to get more out of shallow knowledge and trivia than on deeper concepts, creates…

Do you work in software? It's making new things with new things that software makers better at what they do.

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

#233

Post by joshuahughes »

thepenguinco wrote: post #160
tzs wrote: post #125

Documentation. 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

I’m one of those sad product designers who finds documentation tools fascinating :) Ping me if you need a hand on the design side (mrjoshuahughes at gmail)

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

#234

Post by whateveracct »

thundergolfer wrote: post #230
silviogutierrez wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Agree that Nix is a great candidate. The PhD about it is quite readable and demonstrates the rigour with which the author approaches this problem space. It’s pretty difficult to understand and use though.

Nix has pretty awful UX for sure. It's kind of a trial by fire to learn it.

But once you do, you can build abstractions to improve that UX. But it would be nice if vanilla Nix was easier.

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

#235

Post by lubujackson »

Next level web scraping that takes any web app and fully groks its structure, devolving it to a JSON-like document that encapsulates all form elements, design elements and extrapolates some basic validation rules and the underlying data structure. Load that into a universal editor, work on the metacode. Since we are dreaming, compile that metacode back to any number of frontend/backend combo templates. The result would always be incomplete, but it would give you an amazing base for knocking out projects.

Web design seems to be unifying around progressive web design principles and too many devs spend way too much time recreating the same variations of CRUD apps.

If any new web feature could be distilled to a metacode base and then restructured from there we could maybe find a way to escape this nightmarish hydra of web technologies.

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

#237

Post by k__ »

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…

I was looking in offerings like Glitch lately.

Codesandbox had better UX than Glitch, at least for my taste.

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

#238

Post by hanoz »

lame88 wrote: post #219

A constantly cycling proliferation of different languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. that all do the same things in a different way and are most often mutually incompatible with each other and have entirely different ecosystems with their own comparative advantages but also major pitfalls. This causes tech workers’ investment in skills to get more out of shallow knowledge and trivia than on deeper concepts, creates…

And conversely, the problematic consequence and cause of all that: Resume Driven Development.

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

#239

Post by k__ »

amasad wrote: post #114
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…

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…

How does it compare to Codesandbox?

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

#240

Post by k__ »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #218
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…

Have you tried using VSCode's remote development extension? In a nutshell: your repo contains a file (or directory) with everything needed to set up a containerized run environment for the project. VSCode adds its own server daemon, and your IDE runs half inside the container, half on the host machine. Once it's set up, everyone on the project (who has vscode) instantly has a one click clean, working development envi…

I thought about creating an AMI for AWS that uses code-server instead of Cloud9.
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