Well you poked a stick in the hornet's nest for sure. Now we're all watching you :)
I'll give you my current high-level pet peeve for free:
While programming, it is so incredibly easy to miss something, to not be entirely thorough.
I think a lot of problems originate from the fact that, even for an experienced programmer, it is hard to get a feel for what a function actually does, including all the corner cases. Especially if someone else wrote it, or you wrote it a long time ago. Yes, you can read the program text, and encounter a lot of logical expressions, evaluations, etc. Fitting it all into your head can be difficult and takes quite some time. Code as text format is quite limited and slow to parse deeply in your brain.
I'm sure that is possible for a tool (some kind of uber-IDE) to help with this, for the compiler to 'explore' what happens inside the function (as that's what a compiler does). But what it can't do is show it to you in a useful way.
Some vague ideas around this:
- test cases: a lot of work in writing test cases is simply mechanical. You want to evaluate all the code paths, verify assertions and function input/output. There are initiatives like (Microsoft) Pex that attempt this. If you have auto-generated unit test-cases that explore the corner cases you get more feel for what a program does and what might still be wrong.
- code verification: computers are incredibly fast, and can understand the code that we type instantly. With post/preconditions and assertions, it could be possible to find bugs and overseen cases while we type in the background by random/structured "brute force" fuzzing (let the monkey loose) or modeling analytically. Imagine the hours of debugging saved.
- graphical languages: pictures sometimes say more than words. Would also remove the "mental overhead" of worrying about specific superficial program syntax. Alternative representations of source code. Some kind of (intuitive) graphical visualization of software would be very useful. Both for building programs and looking at programs from a new perspective. This could also include intermediates between fully graphical and fully text, or simply looking at the program in another syntax.
- literate programming: why did this never go anywhere in the mainstream? the perspective/train of thought of the developer would be another input to the person maintaining the code. Code comments are part of the solution, but they're completely separate from the program. To be more useful the there needs to be a deeper way to associate/interleave the train of thought and even discussions between developers with the code.
Anyway, there's probably lots of issues with these ideas, but I do feel that better tools of the trade could help. Things don't have to be completely automated, but the computer could certainly help more in filling in the blanks. It seems that with all the jobs 'we' automate, there is little focus in automating part of the job of a software developer (on the other hand, the state of the art does advance, high-level languages like Python and PHP already helped a lot in making us more productive, oh man imagine that we had to write everything in C...)
I'll give you my current high-level pet peeve for free:
While programming, it is so incredibly easy to miss something, to not be entirely thorough.
I think a lot of problems originate from the fact that, even for an experienced programmer, it is hard to get a feel for what a function actually does, including all the corner cases. Especially if someone else wrote it, or you wrote it a long time ago. Yes, you can read the program text, and encounter a lot of logical expressions, evaluations, etc. Fitting it all into your head can be difficult and takes quite some time. Code as text format is quite limited and slow to parse deeply in your brain.
I'm sure that is possible for a tool (some kind of uber-IDE) to help with this, for the compiler to 'explore' what happens inside the function (as that's what a compiler does). But what it can't do is show it to you in a useful way.
Some vague ideas around this:
- test cases: a lot of work in writing test cases is simply mechanical. You want to evaluate all the code paths, verify assertions and function input/output. There are initiatives like (Microsoft) Pex that attempt this. If you have auto-generated unit test-cases that explore the corner cases you get more feel for what a program does and what might still be wrong.
- code verification: computers are incredibly fast, and can understand the code that we type instantly. With post/preconditions and assertions, it could be possible to find bugs and overseen cases while we type in the background by random/structured "brute force" fuzzing (let the monkey loose) or modeling analytically. Imagine the hours of debugging saved.
- graphical languages: pictures sometimes say more than words. Would also remove the "mental overhead" of worrying about specific superficial program syntax. Alternative representations of source code. Some kind of (intuitive) graphical visualization of software would be very useful. Both for building programs and looking at programs from a new perspective. This could also include intermediates between fully graphical and fully text, or simply looking at the program in another syntax.
- literate programming: why did this never go anywhere in the mainstream? the perspective/train of thought of the developer would be another input to the person maintaining the code. Code comments are part of the solution, but they're completely separate from the program. To be more useful the there needs to be a deeper way to associate/interleave the train of thought and even discussions between developers with the code.
Anyway, there's probably lots of issues with these ideas, but I do feel that better tools of the trade could help. Things don't have to be completely automated, but the computer could certainly help more in filling in the blanks. It seems that with all the jobs 'we' automate, there is little focus in automating part of the job of a software developer (on the other hand, the state of the art does advance, high-level languages like Python and PHP already helped a lot in making us more productive, oh man imagine that we had to write everything in C...)