What is the single top-priority software engineering problem?

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.

I was thinking about the reasons why this happens, and I see two major factors:



1) The tension between abstraction and optimization. To put it shortly, abstraction is about ignoring the details, optimization is about fine-tuning the details; you can't do both at the same time. Which is why different programming languages make different kinds of compromise. You could make a beautiful language or framework with elegant abstractions, then look at the performance and cry. Or optimize for performance, and then cry while reading and debugging the code.

2) The tension between mathematical elegance and the cost of hiring people who are great at math. Some developers care about having the code elegant from a mathematical perspective, but the companies optimize for having a product to sell, as cheaply as possible, which involves a lot of cutting corners. A product full of bugs can still make you millions of dollars. And what's the point of having a mathematical proof of correctness of your current code, when the business requirements are going to change tomorrow anyway.


What do you think?