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

208 点作者 abrax3141超过 5 年前
If you have unlimited time and/or resources, what single software engineering problem would you address? I'm not talking about "Peace on Earth"-type problems, but rather real world practical problems facing software engineering that could be actually solved if you could pay an rationally large team of serious hackers a rationally large amount of money for a rationally long period of time. Another way of asking this is: What's the most important piece of technical debt across software engineering, that could practically be solved if we put enough energy into it?

109 条评论

simonw超过 5 年前
Development environments. The amount of time and hassle I&#x27;ve seen lost to getting a working development environment up and running is incredible.<p>Every time I talk to someone who&#x27;s learning to program I tell them: &quot;Setting up your development environment will be a nightmare. I have been doing this for twenty years and it&#x27;s STILL a nightmare for me every time I do it. You are not alone.&quot;<p>Docker is reasonably good here... except you have to install Docker, and learn to use Docker Compose, and learn enough of the abstractions that you can fix it when something breaks.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glitch.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glitch.com&#x2F;</a> is by far the best step forward I&#x27;ve seen on this problem, but it&#x27;s relatively limited in terms of what you can accomplish with it.
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lame88超过 5 年前
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 silos of employment opportunity based on the trivial knowledge workers have, and hinders the ability for the software engineering field as a whole to have a large pool of shared knowledge and develop and evolve stable, relatively timeless systems and tools of high quality, both as end products and in intermediate tooling toward those ends.
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dfabulich超过 5 年前
We need a faster web framework that generates HTML on mobile phones with no JS on the main thread.<p>The web is the &quot;single top-priority&quot; software platform, but it&#x27;s in big, big trouble.<p>On mobile, users spend less than 7% of their time on the web. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;364402896" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;364402896</a> All of the rest of their time is in native apps, where big corporations decide what you are and aren&#x27;t allowed to do.<p>As a result, the money is going to native apps. The ad money is going there, the dev time is going there, and the mobile-web developer ecosystem is in peril.<p>The biggest reason people use native apps instead of mobile web apps is performance. Developers design web apps for fast desktop CPUs on fast WiFi data connections, and test their sites on top-of-the-line smartphones costing 5x-10x as much as the cheap smartphones people actually carry around.<p>Web developers have to solve this performance problem the way we&#x27;ve always solved our problems: with a new framework. ;-)<p>But specifically we need a framework designed to generate HTML with no JS at all, and designed to run in a Service Worker, which is a little web server that runs directly on the user&#x27;s phone.<p>This style of app is often called a &quot;Progressive Web App,&quot; and there are plenty of frameworks that support PWAs, but they generate PWAs on top of a single-page app framework that downloads megabytes of JavaScript running on the main thread. PWA is an afterthought for most frameworks, but we need it to be the centerpiece of the design.
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fmjrey超过 5 年前
What matters most is what you want to still be there when the power goes off: data.<p>No amount of processing power matters if you don&#x27;t have the data.<p>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&#x27;m not saying engineers don&#x27;t think about these things, they obviously have to think about it at some point. It&#x27;s just that data is always accessory to the story. It&#x27;s like processing is the cool kid and data is the stinky one nobody wants to approach unless you have to. Look at the 12 factor principles for example, where is data in there? How easy is it to take data from one place&#x2F;cloud&#x2F;database to another? Data is the raw material, it needs to be the primary concern in programming languages and architectures, not objects or functions, containers or whatever, those come after, not first.
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dane-pgp超过 5 年前
A piece of technology that seems to be missing is a global decentralised anonymous identity and trust framework. It probably requires a leap of engineering comparable to the invention of the blockchain (although I don&#x27;t think that a blockchain is necessarily the model to follow here, since the data should be encrypted).<p>Every website and app and network service seems to be reinventing the wheel here, and end up creating little silos of trust data, whereas in principle it should be possible to receive a (locally) consistent answer to the question of &quot;Is this person in good standing with the other humans they interact with?&quot; whether that person is sending you an email, or writing a software library you are downloading, or creating an account on your website, or selling you goods on Ebay, or offering you a lift through a ride sharing app.
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say_it_as_it_is超过 5 年前
I would fund a rigorous study of frontend development with a team of academics who would gather details from a very large sample of organizations about frontend development projects. My theory that I would seek to validate is that the vast majority of frontend work was unnecessary, overly complex, costly, and shouldn&#x27;t have ever been funded. Chasing new approaches creates new problems. Following FAANG solutions to problems no one has is costing everyone time, effort, and money. Myths need to be debunked. Anecdotal evidence consisting exclusively of success stories is concealing the truth. It feels as if the entire frontend world has gone crazy and received financial support to fund an expensive addiction to unnecessary complexity.
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arexxbifs超过 5 年前
The decline of usability, recognizability and coherence in desktop user interfaces. I honestly think we reached peak UX some time in the mid-90s. With the advent of touch devices, paradigms are mixing in a way that&#x27;s directly hostile to productivity.
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jspaetzel超过 5 年前
Understanding the problem.<p>Most of the time the users haven&#x27;t taken enough time to understand their own problems and have trouble articulating them in a way that&#x27;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.<p>This is why the absolute best software is built by people who are developing for themselves. You know when it&#x27;s not solving your problem and you fix it because you know nobody else will.
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cs02rm0超过 5 年前
I seem to spend far more time on the deployment of code than I ever used to, more time writing CloudFormation and ansible than the Java backend, python lambdas and static UI that it deploys.<p>That <i>seems</i> nuts to me. I&#x27;m not sure how you fix it without being Amazon&#x2F;Google. People moan about Terraform too before that gets mentioned.
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thom超过 5 年前
No idea where this fits on the priority list, but I think a lot of problems around stream processing still aren&#x27;t solved, and it&#x27;s holding us back from a really productive programming paradigm. Handling updates&#x2F;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&#x27;ve come seems to be:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;frankmcsherry&#x2F;differential-dataflow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;frankmcsherry&#x2F;differential-dataflow</a><p>Lots of very active CS research in this area though.
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3pt14159超过 5 年前
Unlimited time and resources? I&#x27;d try to tackle the global security issues related to advanced cyberattack. It&#x27;s such a complex problem I don&#x27;t even know if it&#x27;s possible, but it would require hardening software update servers, networks, and utilities (especially electrical power distribution) to the point where a single bad Windows update doesn&#x27;t take out the economy.
tzs超过 5 年前
Documentation.<p>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&#x27;t figure out how to approach it.<p>Another documentation problem, especially with open source projects, is that development and documentation are often loosely coupled, if at all. The people doing documentation usually don&#x27;t have the resources to keep up with development, and so even if there is good well organized comprehensive documentation it is usually obsolete.
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rodolphoarruda超过 5 年前
Having my phone as my ultimate CPU, immediately connectable to commodity peripherals (monitor, keyboard, printers) at home, office and on the street. Content would be stored on the phone following the &quot;local fist&quot; principle to favor speed and security.<p>Something like Ubuntu Edge for those who remember it, but with more local storage -- TBs maybe -- more connectivity out of the box.
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ronyfadel超过 5 年前
Decent nocode, or some sort of nocode holy grail.<p>I want to be able to plug APIs together, process user input, have persistence and identity, without writing so much boilerplate.
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js8超过 5 年前
Formally specify all the commonly used languages, runtimes and APIs, so that we could translate programs between them. Then make sure that all programs such translated can be compiled, so that we don&#x27;t waste resources by running inefficient VMs.
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belltaco超过 5 年前
&gt;What&#x27;s the most important piece of technical debt across software engineering, that could practically be solved if we put enough energy into it?<p>Being able to update libraries, tools etc. automatically and without friction. Right now upgrading is so tedious, error prone and painful that most places just keep using ancient versions that are not only lacking bug fixes and newer features but are a huge attack surface.
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naasking超过 5 年前
A true build once run anywhere platform, that doesn&#x27;t sacrifice security or verifiability, and that would also scale from embedded systems (that are often married to their own limited C compiler), up to distributed systems and mobile code (like browsers acting as a remote UI typical of web apps).<p>WASM is a great advance over what came before in many ways, but still has some room for improvement. These are all problems with known good solutions, but there is no holistic platform that integrates these smoothly. It&#x27;s largely a hodge podge of various programming languages, configuration systems, build systems, scripts, etc. Look elsewhere in this thread for people complaining about how difficult it still is to setup a development environment. Embedded programming is typically even worse, though it&#x27;s improved dramatically since the rise of Arduino.<p>It needn&#x27;t be this way though. A well designed programming language can be used for configuration, scripting and more. Racket is a good example on the dynamically typed side, and F# is a good example for a statically typed language along these lines.
GrumpyYoungMan超过 5 年前
Build the tools and infrastructure necessary to make FPGA accelerator programming accessible to the average programmer. Moore&#x27;s Law is mostly dead; we are getting more cores but we are not going to get significantly faster cores in the near future. What will bring us next big jump in computing performance is unclear but FPGA acceleration seems like one of the few promising directions.
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petters超过 5 年前
A computer and OS that boots in 100ms. Every user action gives a response in 10ms.
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snisarenko超过 5 年前
Documentation!<p>I am willing to go out on a limb and say that as much as 25% of software engineering time worldwide is wasted due to poor documentation.<p>It&#x27;s an asymmetric problem too. If someone benevolently funds a team of engineers for a couple of months to write great docs (with detailed examples) for top 500 libraries, frameworks, APIs. They could increase global productivity of software engineers by %25 percent.
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alimoeeny超过 5 年前
UI development is still very clunky on any desktop OS other than windows. (and I have not done UI on windows in a decade, it used to be pretty good back in the day). iOS is good, I mean like you want to create a utility to do a job for yourself, not a big project.<p>And I know there are lots of html &#x2F; web based things you can run on desktop but they are even more complex, for me at least.
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rhn_mk1超过 5 年前
Formal verification in the basic parts of the infrastructure.<p>User interface responsiveness.<p>The Web being based on standards that leak users&#x27; data left and right.
kukkeliskuu超过 5 年前
I believe there are cycles in computing, one of them is between centralized and distributed, another little bit different one is between local and remote computing. For example stuff is moving into cloud, but then we have mobile apps. Etc.<p>Thus, on a longer term, you might want to identify the cycles and look into opportunities beyond the current phase in these cycles, and whether there are under-utilized ideas there.<p>For instance, for unix-style command line operation, we have the idea of piping data between applications and combining multiple applications to perform a job.<p>These applications communicate through very simple protocol, the text file format, where one line means one thing. Thus, if we want to combine more complex applications, such as operations on image files, each needs to implement their own processing for various file formats etc.<p>My idea would be to try to increase the abstraction level of operating system from files to something more generic.<p>For example, what kind of things I could script more easily if the operating system would allow me to read source code tokens&#x2F;statements&#x2F;packages in any language? Or images as an abstraction regardless of their file type?
ChuckMcM超过 5 年前
End to end validation of complex systems.<p>Cookie-cutter developers using open source they don&#x27;t understand to implement mission critical infrastructure for companies that don&#x27;t understand the internet. Its a recipe for disaster.
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genidoi超过 5 年前
A search engine that produces results you would find interesting&#x2F;helpful&#x2F;engaging most of the time. It should heavily penalize SEO optimized, clickbaity listicle trash. Content that was created organically as part of a conversation should rank very highly if it&#x27;s relevant to the query, as well as blog posts from obscure but highly relevant and informed sources.<p>Google died when they stopped being well informed librarians and started being aggressive salespeople. It&#x27;s time for a new search engine to step in specifically catered to the curious.
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lidHanteyk超过 5 年前
In engineering: There should be a single global content-addressed namespace for data. The space should be unguessable, rather than enumerable or searchable. The effect would be to end all problems of networked data storage, and also to end copyright. DNS, Bittorrent, IPFS are all fine attempts, but also clear and abject failures. If it&#x27;s not possible, then we should prove the impossibility.<p>In theory: Prove that one-way functions don&#x27;t exist, or explicitly construct one. Similarly, prove that P!=NP, or similarly settle the question.
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elihu超过 5 年前
I think coming up with a good, modern alternative to the traditional Unix&#x2F;Linux&#x2F;Posix-style OS software interface would be worthwhile. Something more consistent, user-friendly, and designed with modern security concerns in mind.
inglor超过 5 年前
Code reviews are bad, I want to be able to run the code and put breakpoints from GitHub.<p>Having to check out the branch, install dependencies, build the code and run it only to then go back to the UI to see the changes and comments is very time consuming and being able to test suggested changes instantly would save me a ton of time.<p>I would gladly pay for this.
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amiga_500超过 5 年前
Removing out of date and incorrect advice on c++ from the internet.
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alangibson超过 5 年前
On the meta level, I want a tool that shows me the wasted time and resources in my business&#x27; development pipeline, all the way from idea to delivery. There are endless numbers of tools that will spit out metrics that no one knows how to interpret, but I want a tool that gives me actionable advice on specific things my teams can do to increase their throughput and reduce lead times and work in progress.
Const-me超过 5 年前
I would create a cross-platform GPU-targeted GUI framework for .NET Core. Something like Avalonia, only without skia, directly on top of D3D11, GL, GLES or Metal. Modern GPUs are awesome, can directly render very complicated vector graphics. Outside Windows not used for GUI despite there&#x27;s need for that, slow mobile CPUs + very high rez displays are both common.
Ididntdothis超过 5 年前
Training could be improved. We somehow seem to repeatedly solve the same problems. It would be nice if programmers were more aware of the things that were done in the past.
contingencies超过 5 年前
Requirements specification. It trumps every single concern raised so far. If you&#x27;re seriously considering R&amp;D in this space, count me in.
hartator超过 5 年前
Only 2 things: Naming things, invalidating caches, and off-by-one errors.
WalterBright超过 5 年前
Memory safety. And I am addressing it by adding an Ownership&#x2F;Borrowing system to D.
loudouncodes超过 5 年前
Training on a common ‘software engineering body of knowledge’. The state of the art is so different across organizations it’s like having medical tricorders at one place and leeches at another.
Too超过 5 年前
The silver bullet programming language + environment. Fast and zero-cost-abstraction as c++, safe as Rust, productive as Python, async as Go, runs everywhere like JS, live upgrades like Erlang, development environment as C#, designed for remote debugging, near instant recompilation and testing, universal dependency manager with sandboxing of shared libraries and scm integration.<p>There is still room for Domain Specific languages like sql, html and such but for imperative programming there are way too many options all filling almost the same need with just slight variation. Even with the rise of all types of VMs and cross compilers we are still porting mountains of code to another language just because the execution environment was slightly different. The gap between embedded and web is also too big, for embedded you are stuck with prehistoric c++ with dangerous syntax, hour-long build times and days of figuring out how to correctly compile and link that shared library. vs web where your only options are dynamic languages where both safety, predictability and performance are a joke. I also realize safety and performance vs productivity often contradicts each other but not as much as often argued, there has to be a better middle ground than what we are stuck with today.<p>In isolation, this should be an achievable task, especially if dropping any legacy compatibility. What might be difficult is is people want legacy compatibility and proven in use, so adaptation-rate will turn this into &quot;there are now 15 competing standards&quot; and a &quot;peace on earth&quot;-type problem.
fillskills超过 5 年前
Making software security &amp; data privacy really easy for all stakeholders. It&#x27;s something I dread doing as an engineer but I know is one the most important &#x27;feature&#x27; the customers are expecting to be baked into what I write.
new_guy超过 5 年前
Privacy at the language level. There&#x27;s a lot of inroads been made[0] but still a long way to go before it&#x27;s just ubiquitous.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jeanqasaur" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jeanqasaur</a>
alangibson超过 5 年前
My kingdom for a technology that lets me write an app once and run it acceptably on Android, iOS and in the browser. This probably beats everything else listed in this thread in terms of developer hours saved.
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gok超过 5 年前
Efficiency.<p>A large and increasing amount of human-made energy goes to computation, yet only a tiny proportion of software is written with energy efficiency in mind. Most programmers don&#x27;t even have the tools to answer how much power their programs consume.<p>At a start, no compute benchmark that measures wall duration should ever be taken seriously if it doesn&#x27;t also include energy consumption.
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anonnybonny超过 5 年前
IMHO, making WebAssembly fully and tightly integrated with browsers like JS is today will be the next big leap forward. In such a way that you won&#x27;t need to use JS at all - direct access to DOM and other Web APIs, choice to use whatever programming language you want<p>Java applets came 20 years too early - potentially had the power to do everything we do with the web today but 10x faster and more cleanly.<p>The web remains one place where you lack the freedom to easily use whatever language you like - WASM will end the era of JS if they do it right.<p>The JS ecosystem is extremely wild and turbulent - even something as simple as &quot;I need this project to be built exactly as it was in August 2017&quot; is almost impossible with the npm world.<p>Meanwhile native apps compiled in 1985 still run, and can even build today with minimal fuss.<p>Lets be honest - how many of you use JS because there was no other option? Its not a terrible language - in fact I like JS&#x2F;ES7 more than python, but it&#x27;s still one of the pillars of chaos in the world of programming
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fsflover超过 5 年前
Rewriting all popular proprietary software with GPL license, such that no more vendor lock-ins prevent people from using old hardware.
AndrewKemendo超过 5 年前
State observability for the entire stack.
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veeralpatel979超过 5 年前
Measuring how productive software engineers are.<p>If you could solve this problem, you could convince management why engineers need offices, for one.
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chrisweekly超过 5 年前
CSS bloat belongs somewhere on the list. Thankfully, actual, pragmatic and standards-based solutions (proper design systems, treatment of layout as a first-class concern, and component-scoped CSS-in-JS) are finally emerging.
charlzbryan超过 5 年前
There are so many times where I think think to myself, &quot;We shouldn&#x27;t be doing this in 2020&quot;. Just mundane stuff like checking for null values and stuff. You&#x27;d expect we&#x27;d have this covered by now
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thrower123超过 5 年前
I would somehow fix software engineering training so that people understood the vast corpus of techniques and approaches that have been tried, what the pros and cons of them were, and what the reactions to those issues were. Less on the theoretical algorithmic level, but on the practical and implementation level.<p>We should not be rewriting and adopting a slightly better but incompatible version of make every five years, or waffling between SQL and NoSQL, or churning back and forth between slightly different versions of MVC paradigms. Or going from tables to div-tables to flow layouts to css-grid.
Supermancho超过 5 年前
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.<p>I can think of 2 ripe opportunities, that I reference often.<p>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 design.<p>2. Put a more type safe language on the browser with concurrency primitives. Promises are a hack improvement and Python is too rigid in ideology to make it eventially compatible.
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Areading314超过 5 年前
Package management for C&#x2F;C++. Every project I&#x27;ve worked on has required significant setup effort. Also, downloading OSS and compiling often fails due to dependencies.
axilmar超过 5 年前
These are the top problems in my opinion:<p>1) computers handle bits and bytes, not information. If computers can be made to create, search, update and delete pieces of information, instead of bits and bytes, 90% of code would go away and life would be much easier for all of us.<p>2) programming is done wrongly and poorly: we write a program to do a specific job, without any proofs, with serial control flow, we compile it, we setup an environment for it, etc. Instead, we should write hierarchies of programs, each level of hierarchy should have its own proofs (i.e. the specifications should be part of our programs), control flow should be event based, programs should be running as soon as we write them in a live test environment etc.<p>In other words, forget files, processes, handles, databases, source files, bits, bytes, the command line, UIs etc. All these provide some level of abstraction that doesn&#x27;t really scale to what we actually need. We need another level of abstraction: the piece of information.<p>Which should eventually include a piece of code that communicates with the outside world via events, and that code would be composed of other pieces of information, would be fully creatable, searchable, updatable and deletable just like any other sort of piece of information.<p>And UIs should be creatable, searchable, updatable and deletable pieces of information as well.<p>And a global communication language would replace all command line interfaces, UIs, and programming languages: we shall talk to our UIs with this language, and the UIs shall talk to us by using that language as well, using graphical representation when needed.
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l0b0超过 5 年前
Replace POSIX shell with something reasonable. Anyone trying to bring in a feature or name &quot;because history&quot; is temporarily banned from the working group. Other than that I&#x27;ve no idea how it should be done or what will emerge, but I would hope for it to include words like &quot;exception handling&quot;, &quot;test framework&quot;, &quot;API&quot;, &quot;concurrency&quot; and &quot;asynchronous stream processing&quot; non-ironically.
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oli5679超过 5 年前
Open source implementation of Microsoft Excel, which lets you write macros using Python and has the plotting, scheduling and report sharing functionality of Tableau.
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tyingq超过 5 年前
Some new software that matches what <i>&quot;Ruby on Rails&quot;</i> used to be would be welcome.<p>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.<p>A relatively sane, top-to-bottom framework that isn&#x27;t the fastest, or &quot;best&quot;, but &quot;good enough&quot;...would be welcome. Maybe Golang or Rust or Node will progress to having their own &quot;Rails&quot;?
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mhh__超过 5 年前
Ignoring hard problems like memory safety and parallelization (let&#x27;s say), I think the biggest soft problem that I experience is optimizing the amount of time spent doing <i>work</i> relative to setting up boilerplate - mainly during web programming, i.e. it took me literally a few days to work out how to use code from <i>and</i> deploy node_modules without cheating.<p>Not trivial but maybe automated by some meta-meta-build tool?
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purpleidea超过 5 年前
Getting rid of proprietary code, particularly in anything that is safety, health, or security related. Doubly so for code in chips and any firmware.
closeparen超过 5 年前
A distributed database engine with the same semantics as single-node Postgres that&#x27;s easy to operate reliably.<p>Cannot tell you how much time I spend fighting solved-since-1980 RDBMS problems at the application layer. But we really are too big for single-master (pushed it to its breaking point and a little beyond).
lubujackson超过 5 年前
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&#x2F;backend combo templates. The result would always be incomplete, but it would give you an amazing base for knocking out projects.<p>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.<p>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.
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gameswithgo超过 5 年前
1. A cross platform gui library, that could replace electron as the go to choice when making cross platform apps with a GUI.<p>2. Tools to help making parallel programming easier, without massive impacts on efficiency. Future CPUs are offering more performance primarily through more cores and wider vector instructions. Currently to use these efficiently is often very hard.<p>3. A replacement for C&#x2F;C++. Rust is promising, you could contribute there, or to Zig, or come up with something better.<p>4. large scale, high quality studies into the efficacy of various programming ideas, languages, methodologies, etc. (Does dynamic typing increasing or decrease productivity, or under what domains does it do one or the other, does functional programming reduce error rates, by how much, and at what performance cost? etc
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Taikonerd超过 5 年前
I&#x27;d like to see static analysis and formal verification become more integrated with our development practices, especially w.r.t. security.<p>In a perfect world, I&#x27;d like to run an analyzer on my CRUD app&#x27;s source code, and have it list the 37 vulnerabilities I overlooked.
mlinksva超过 5 年前
Some conventional wisdom candidates for most importance piece of technical debt across software engineering: complexity, memory unsafety, excess authority, formal methods underutilized<p>Probably not a candidate for &quot;most&quot; but maybe worth mentioning: pgp<p>There&#x27;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.<p>Surely there are existing projects, or at least communities, that have formed around taking on what participants thought&#x2F;think of the most importance piece of technical debt, at least that they were&#x2F;are equipped to take on; perhaps [non-]reproducible builds, shotgun parsers (langsec)?
sebastianconcpt超过 5 年前
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.<p>I&#x27;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).<p>For inspiration on what form it could take, I&#x27;d take a look at all Sci-Fi I can but pay special attention to Bret Victor&#x27;s: Humane Representation of Thought <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;115154289" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vimeo.com&#x2F;115154289</a>
l0b0超过 5 年前
Cross-platform, low latency, FOSS graphics and audio stacks. Basically something combining the best desktop frameworks of the last 30 years, rather than the last six months. Let&#x27;s have some actual UX rather than 10 different ways of toggling a boolean.
aalhour超过 5 年前
Declarative Programming.<p>Specify a problem statement and let the computer figure out a way to implement it but take this idea and apply it to SaaS Applications. Here&#x27;s how a domain model looks like, go figure out a database-backed API application implementation for me.
mlthoughts2018超过 5 年前
Sufficient research and PR efforts to finally refute open-plan office designs and render it intractable for firms to use open hypocrisy to disingenuously justify them without consequence as they do today.<p>Because this affects cognitive health and productivity of just about every tech employee, it truly is the biggest problem and is no overstatement at all that we would cure more diseases, feed more hungry people, develop better policies for people in need, or even just satisfy consumer demands more profitably, if the scourge of open-plan offices finally goes away.<p>Very few other problems faced by engineering workers are so vast and systemic as open-plan offices, with such far reaching value if it is solved.
itronitron超过 5 年前
fixing the shit-show of modern web application development
kaushikt超过 5 年前
Single top-priority for software engineering - testing to improve quality. If a lot of organisations are still not writing 100% test coverage to reduce ops and increase reliability with quality then something is broken. It&#x27;s mostly got to do with engineering culture itself. Google famously did Testing on the toilet experiment which paid off.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;testing.googleblog.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;01&#x2F;introducing-testing-on-toilet.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;testing.googleblog.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;01&#x2F;introducing-testing-o...</a>
xkriva11超过 5 年前
The problem of Availability vs. Accessibility. In our systems, some functionality is often available but not accessible for usage in another context. It causes a huge loss of money and wastes human work. Mobile platforms are significantly touched by it. You may have, for example, a perfect application for spell checking but you cannot use it directly while doing your spreadsheet. Generally, the user interface needs to be direct and modeless. Applications are, of course, giant modes.
agentultra超过 5 年前
I’d work on an industrial grade proof assistant and model checker suite. IDE, cloud integration, and visualization tools to push the practice of formal methods in industry.
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pmlnr超过 5 年前
Accessible, cheap, documented, standardized long - 50+ years - archiving physical mediums and their software ecosystem, made available for everyone.<p>There&#x27;s nothing out there for this.
perlgeek超过 5 年前
There are things for which we don&#x27;t seem to have found good ways to enable code reuse.<p>I&#x27;m talking about things like sign-up workflows, password recovery, two-factor authentication, role-based access control, search, approvals by manager, integration with BI tools etc.<p>There are application development frameworks that solve some of these problems for you, but they tend to be so heavy-weight and&#x2F;or impose so many restrictions on you that they hardly seem worth using.
Liron超过 5 年前
Everyone has a complicated &quot;data layer&quot; with multiple boxes taped together. It should just be one database.<p>The root of the problem is that data denormalization is broken [0]. The fix is doable in theory, yet not done yet, and not talked about enough.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@lironshapira&#x2F;data-denormalization-is-broken-7b697352f405" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@lironshapira&#x2F;data-denormalization-is-bro...</a>
austincheney超过 5 年前
I would create a vendor agnostic nonprofit developer certification program. Something similar to ISC2.<p>Right now there is no differentiation between actual engineers who write original code and button pressers that either live in configuration hell or that mindlessly need design patterns to tell them what to do.<p>Programming is the act of writing instructions and yet so many developers can neither communicate in writing nor plan a series on instructions.
mkgolden超过 5 年前
Linux on mobile. With the release of pinephone and librem we have the opportunity to remove ourselves from the Google and apple mobile walled gardens.
tiborsaas超过 5 年前
Artificial general intelligence
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emeerson超过 5 年前
Won&#x27;t claim this is the absolute priority, but recently been thinking about the generalizable problem of: &quot;domain disentanglement.&quot;<p>In other words: solve the Data Model Coupling problem programmatically. Applied to an RDBMS, one could imagine a graph with weighted edges representing coupling between database tables and dynamically reverse-engineering joins into DB-isolated API calls.
convolvatron超过 5 年前
effective batteries included declarative programming
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Pfhreak超过 5 年前
Mine is tech related, but make it easier to form and operate tech cooperatives. In general, I&#x27;ve found engineers have the knowledge of what the best thing for their product is, and are often pulled away for various reasons. Making them a part of the owenership structure for their work could pay dividends in quality and usability of software.
salt-licker超过 5 年前
A programming language with Python-like syntax and a Hindley-Milner type system plus typeclasses. Basically, we bring Haskell’s type system an imperative programming language. An easy-to-learn scripting language with a strong, sound type system with reliable type inference will reduce bugs in codebases of every size across the industry.
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soulchild37超过 5 年前
Facebook has literally endless money and talent, and they still comes up with React Native which makes apps slow and bloated
317070超过 5 年前
The singularity. Make software which is capable of making even better software without human intervention.
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mch82超过 5 年前
Decentralizing networks so it becomes impossible to limit access to information &amp; communication.
l0b0超过 5 年前
Next frame responses for any action which could reasonably be computed within a frame. Basically caching at every level of the system and aggressively precomputing and preloading anything the user could reasonably do from the current state. Let&#x27;s use those cycles!
tomc1985超过 5 年前
There&#x27;s too many damn libraries
Aqueous超过 5 年前
writing tests requires sometimes thousands of lines of boilerplate like setting up mocks, crafting assertions, isolating the test environment and data, etc. testing is important but engineers hate doing all the leg work to set them up. if someone could write a testing engine to sort of ‘lock in’ the implementation of a function or class and then automatically alert the developer when the implementation deviates from the locked version’s spec (determined by automatically profiling the functions input and output on a continuous basis) that could improve testing and vastly reduce the amount engineer hours spent on writing tests
abrax3141超过 5 年前
Fix Lisp&#x27;s shortcomings (primarily that its package universe is lagging) so we don’t have to put up with terrible languages like python, which people only bother with because of its well-maintained package universe.
di4na超过 5 年前
Release engineering and tools for &quot;operators&quot; (ie dev and ops and whoever touch your living system) that are collaborative with the Human. There is... basically nothing that exist solving that.
oneplane超过 5 年前
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&#x27;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.<p>Once you get to a point where you can demonstrate that &#x27;doing it faster&#x27; is not an option, everyone gets better for it.<p>Right now, all you get is bypassable CI pipelines, crappy in-IDE tools that sometimes work, and very costly static analysers that usually don&#x27;t work and are more designed to please the clipboard warriors.
abrax3141超过 5 年前
Figure out how to make Linux code bases cross language callable, like .NET, so you could write packages in any language and call them from any other language.
beamatronic超过 5 年前
What makes software hard is the messiness of the human real world: time zones, keyboard layouts, languages, Unicode, GDPR, SOX compliance, etc, etc.
sys_64738超过 5 年前
Make software development a true engineering discipline by making software developers and companies directly liable for bugs and security holes.
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hbt超过 5 年前
interoperability: &quot;the ability of computer systems or software to exchange and make use of information.&quot;<p>Emphasis on exchanging information between 2 unknown programs.<p>So much programming plumbing (parsing text etc.) to do just that.<p>So many hours wasted chasing API documentation to figure out how to call an incantation.<p>So many software features hidden away and inacessible unless used through a UI maze.<p>So much code sitting there unused and undiscoverable.
carapace超过 5 年前
In a word: <i>complexity</i>.<p>(That and the 800lb gorilla in the room: programmers are <i>fashion-driven</i> to the point of absurdity.)<p>Except, thinking about it, I don&#x27;t think it fits your description because it can&#x27;t be solved by the methods you describe. We are &quot;complexity junkies&quot;. Most of us haven&#x27;t hit rock bottom, don&#x27;t see a problem, or are <i>well-paid</i> to feed our habit.<p>We have tools and concepts that would do the trick, but we ignore them.<p>Consider Elm lang. Takes all the complexity out of writing web apps, has a history of zero bugs in the code it generates, doesn&#x27;t get traction because...?<p>- - - -<p>Dr. Margaret Hamilton (of Apollo 11 fame, who coined the phrase &quot;software engineering&quot;) developed a system of software construction she called &quot;Higher-Order Software&quot; that eliminates the sources of most programming bugs. Sadly, it was critically panned and has languished in obscurity for decades. See &quot;System Design from Provably Correct Constructs&quot; for more info.<p>- - - -<p><i>Graydon Hoare</i> gave a talk on the history of compilers[1] and he doesn&#x27;t mention Prolog once. Is it possible he doesn&#x27;t know about the research into logic programming and compilers?<p>E.g. &quot;Parsing and Compiling Using Prolog&quot; Jacques Cohen and Tim Hickey ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems 9(2):125-163 · April 1987 DOI: 10.1145&#x2F;22719.22946 · Source: DBLP <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;220404296_Parsing_and_Compiling_Using_Prolog" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;220404296_Parsing_a...</a><p><pre><code> 1. Introduction 2. Parsing 2.1 Bottom-Up 2.2 Top-Down 2.3 Recursive Descent 3. Syntax-Directed Translation 4. M-Grammars and DCGs 5. Grammar Properties 6. Lexical Scanners And Parser Generation 7. Code Generation 7.1 Generating Code from Polish 7.2 Generating Code from Trees 7.3 A Machine-Independent Algorithm for Code Generation 7.4 Code Generation from a Labelled Tree 8. Optimizations 8.1 Compile-Time Evaluation 8.2 Peephole Optimization 9. Using Proposed Extension 10. Final Remarks </code></pre> That&#x27;s from <i>1987</i>.<p>Long story short, if you want to write a compiler it&#x27;s easier and faster to learn Prolog and write it in that than to learn to write a compiler in whatever lower-level language you might already know.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;rust-creator-graydon-hoare-recounts-the-history-of-compilers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenewstack.io&#x2F;rust-creator-graydon-hoare-recounts-t...</a>
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mikst超过 5 年前
Rewrite the Internet stack - it&#x27;s a bunch of layers on top of workarounds on top of layers of workarounds.
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cloudking超过 5 年前
Writing and implementing test automation
techslave超过 5 年前
iot security. some kind of framework to allow iot devices to be secure by default. android things tried to address this but too much ecosystem and java requirement. needs to be simpler and lower level.
rurban超过 5 年前
1. The typical 3 safeties: memory type, concurrency.<p>Already solved, but not used.<p>2. False advertising, overhype.<p>Related to 1)
RNeff超过 5 年前
Develop a methodology for writing correct software. No bugs, guaranteed.
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m0llusk超过 5 年前
complexity overload: identify and eliminate unnecessary bloat
zupreme超过 5 年前
That the world never should have abandoned Flash. We could have secured its communications and isolated its OS interaction, while still providing awesome user experiences.<p>I truly miss many immersive Flash experiences on the web.
geofft超过 5 年前
One practical technical problem that also has direct &quot;peace on earth&quot; implications is getting software that reliably doesn&#x27;t have exploits into the hands of oppressed people (or, equivalently enough, of all people). If you&#x27;re a human rights lawyer working with the Uyghur people, you should be able to use a secure end-to-end messaging app and not be hacked. We&#x27;ve done very well with end-to-end messaging as a cryptographic formulation - now we just need to get the vulnerabilities out of WhatsApp and the iOS kernel and similar, so you can&#x27;t just get NSO&#x27;s Pegasus thrown at you when someone wants to dump your clients in re-education camps.<p>In my opinion there are two big angles here. One is memory safety, which is the primary cause of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities these days (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;LazyFishBarrel" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;LazyFishBarrel</a> for some stats). Any evidence-based approach that reliably reduces memory unsafety bugs is productive - whether that&#x27;s &quot;rewrite it in Rust,&quot; &quot;rewrite it in Go,&quot; &quot;rewrite it in Python,&quot; &quot;rewrite it in Java,&quot; &quot;write really good C static analysis tools,&quot; etc.<p>The other is getting software updates into people&#x27;s hands for a reasonable price. If you buy a cheap Android phone, you&#x27;re buying an insecure Android phone. There are few options for a cheap iOS phone, especially one that&#x27;s still receiving security updates.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;googleprojectzero.blogspot.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;bad-binder-android-in-wild-exploit.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;googleprojectzero.blogspot.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;11&#x2F;bad-binder-an...</a> for a good analysis of a combination of these two problems, specifically weaponized in the wild by NSO Group. One part is that it&#x27;s a use-after-free. The other part is that it was fixed in Linux, and it didn&#x27;t make it into Linux for two years.<p>If I had a large team of serious hackers at my disposal to solve problems for the world, I would work with some of them to fix the highest-risk code written in memory-unsafe languages and get the fixes upstream, and I would work with the rest of them to fix the various process problems that make it hard for Android vendors to upgrade to new versions of Linux and other components continually.<p>(Note that both of these problems are really best solved by a team that can <i>continue working on the problem indefinitely</i>, not a strike team that delivers a thing and then declares the job done.)
crmd超过 5 年前
Cache invalidation
thulecitizen超过 5 年前
Ceptr.org - protocol cooperativism
pbedat超过 5 年前
Video meetings that just work.
Glench超过 5 年前
I think making software human-understandable (and by extension modifiable) is one of the biggest problems for software engineering.<p>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.<p>Not to mention that when trying to modify other&#x27;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 &quot;write-only code&quot;, 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&#x27;s the formidable cognitive challenge of understanding the program well enough to be able to modify it to one&#x27;s ends. For most people, this is a significant and unreasonable effort.<p>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&#x27;ve made toward that end:<p><pre><code> * Legible Mathematics, an essay about the UI design of understandable arithmetic: </code></pre> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;glench.com&#x2F;LegibleMathematics&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;glench.com&#x2F;LegibleMathematics&#x2F;</a><p><pre><code> * FuzzySet: interactive documentation of a JS library, which has helped fix real bugs:</code></pre> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;glench.github.io&#x2F;fuzzyset.js&#x2F;ui&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;glench.github.io&#x2F;fuzzyset.js&#x2F;ui&#x2F;</a><p><pre><code> * Flowsheets V2: a prototype programming environment where you see real data as you program instead of imagining it in your head:</code></pre> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=y1Ca5czOY7Q</a><p><pre><code> * REPLugger: a live REPL + debugger designed for getting immediate feedback when working in large programs:</code></pre> <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=F8p5bj01UWk</a><p><pre><code> * Marilyn Maloney: an interactive explanation of a program designed so that even children could easily understand how it works:</code></pre> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;glench.com&#x2F;MarilynMaloney&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;glench.com&#x2F;MarilynMaloney&#x2F;</a><p>In general, I think it&#x27;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&#x2F;environments.<p>In the end, programming is essentially only limited by human understanding, so that&#x27;s the most significant engineering program out there.
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mrfusion超过 5 年前
Open source robotics
whateveracct超过 5 年前
Better attitudes
donohoe超过 5 年前
Naming things.
smt88超过 5 年前
Most major problems now are people problems, not engineering problems.<p>One example: lots of software devs have no training and&#x2F;or interest in security, and employers have no way to vet that.<p>Another: there is no way for users to trust SaaS security. I have no idea whether (as a random example) Atlassian has a great security culture or a terrible one. We just trust people who seem trustworthy, usually due to their polished marketing.
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