[castle-bravo]

Programming is hard, but progress is being made. For example: I think Haskell is an order of magnitude easier to write than C++. It seems to me that programming languages are evolving to give programmers access to ever higher levels of abstraction.

The holy grail, I think, would be a kind of unification of programming language and mathematical notation, the kind of language in which the models of the Prime Radiant (fom Isaac Asimov's Foundation series) would be expressed. So far, I haven't seen a language that comes close to this ideal, but I think there are lots of people who have a similar vision and have tried to approach it in various ways. Haskell is capable of posessing some small fraction of the terseness and beauty of mathematical expressions, Gerald J Sussman's work in Scheme captures symbolic mathematics and physics beautifully and succinctly, and Stephen Wolfram has elegantly organized an incredible volume of mathematical knowlege in his Mathematica package.

I don't think we can completely eliminate the impedance mismatch between human creativity and computation, but certainly we're working on narrowing that chasm. I can't offer you any suggestions, but if you feel very passionate about it, there may be a project (possibly a thesis project) out there that you could get involved in.