I think it's weird to suggest that programming languages are under-investigated, and the discussion he gives of it makes me question his conclusions about other fields. There are vastly different paradigms completely orthogonal to the hierarchy in that image the author uses. I don't think getting people to stop using assembly/C/fortran/cobol/php/whatever is a research problem.
> makes me question his conclusions about other fields I think this list makes no sense unless it is made into a wiki of some sort with community contributions from hundreds of people. Under "Physics", he has a sub-heading "Increasing Iteration Speed of Experimental Physics". This section mentions one random startup. Yet CERN has hundreds of people actively working on this topic for decades. They invented, built and…
You'd just end up with a lot of noise. The person who wrote this list even has a few scientific publications, which is more background than most people who contribute to the wiki would have.
Perhaps we could create a Foundation that pays a group of scientists a modest salary to spend all their time curating the list. The public can send the Foundation any comments they want.
Of course, the Foundation can't pay enough people to do all the work itself. So they could crowd-source some of the work to people from various fields who know enough about the field to judge what's really under-investigated vs. things that are already thoroughly investigated. Those groups -- panels, let's call them -- could get together and make recommendations to the Foundation.
The Foundation employees could form panels, get their recommendations, and the synthesize that into a list.
And if we're going to all this work to create a good curated list, then maybe the government or donors or whoever could even fund some of the ideas that come out of the final curated list. Not a ton of money -- just enough to hire one or two people to work on the idea for few years. Maybe call the final curated list a Portfolio or something.
IDK what we could call such a Foundation. I guess if the government funds it we could call it the National Science Foundation or something list that. And if it's private, probably focused on more near-term stuff, maybe "VC firm".
Sounds like a really good idea.