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

> good luck with a legacy microservice architecture in a few years. And it seems to be getting worse.

It is getting worse. The complexity of systems and their dependencies are growing faster than the discipline of seeking to reduce accidental complexity.

For people interested by this rebol inspired language https://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html?m=1

Probably not a candidate for "most" but maybe worth mentioning: pgp

There's also lots of non-technical debt; indeed not even any of the above are purely technical, at the least getting solutions adopted likely requires a lot more than just serious hacking.

Surely there are existing projects, or at least communities, that have formed around taking on what participants thought/think of the most importance piece of technical debt, at least that they were/are equipped to take on; perhaps [non-]reproducible builds, shotgun parsers (langsec)?

As it stands, both beginners and experts have difficulties understanding exactly what their own programs are doing as well as what programs written by other people are doing. We encode complex algorithms in static, abstract text descriptions that are hard for humans to understand and reason about. We have to imagine the behavior in our heads from these illegible descriptions. The behavior and internal workings of their programs are invisible.

Not to mention that when trying to modify other's programs there is often a huge communication problem, trying to construct a mental model of what the program does is a tedious and often impossible endeavor because of missing context. Just think, how is it even possible to make "write-only code", code that was understood when written but is now completely unintelligible. To me, that should be impossible. Or think about how open source software is open in that its code is available, but closed in terms of being easily understood — there's the formidable cognitive challenge of understanding the program well enough to be able to modify it to one's ends. For most people, this is a significant and unreasonable effort.

What to do about all this? To me, the answer is redesign programming so that it is primarily about communicating behavior to humans. A couple things I've made toward that end:

  * Legible Mathematics, an essay about the UI design of understandable arithmetic: 

  * FuzzySet: interactive documentation of a JS library, which has helped fix real bugs:

  * Flowsheets V2: a prototype programming environment where you see real data as you program instead of imagining it in your head:

  * REPLugger: a live REPL + debugger designed for getting immediate feedback when working in large programs:

  * Marilyn Maloney: an interactive explanation of a program designed so that even children could easily understand how it works:

In general, I think it's a neat research direction to redesign many concrete programs by hand in the most understandable way possible (using custom graphics, interactivity, game design mechanics — all the best things we have for helping someone understand things through media), and then use those experiments to work backward toward programming languages/environments.

In the end, programming is essentially only limited by human understanding, so that's the most significant engineering program out there.

Though I'm glad for the flexibility it will offer you...that doesn't seem like an awesome idea/trend.