untapped "subfields" within programming

as per title, what are some niche and relatively untapped subfields that exist within programming? im sure most of us make a living developing B2B applications, while a few chosen turboautists might work as systems programmers instead. but there must be more to it than this, right? like some specialized niches of programmers doing stuff the rest of us mere mortals isn't even aware it exists. discuss anything of the sort ITT.(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST, You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf.)

>>39222 I've always felt that VPLs were underexplored. In practice, the vast majority of them are either meant for educational use, like Scratch, or domain-specific like Pure Data, and that's a shame. Maybe it's my childhood making contraptions in LittleBigPlanet talking, but I find it to be a very natural way to describe algorithms and logic.

>>39224 blueprints & nodes for shader code literally visual lego for coding and i cant decide whether i like or hate it because in some cases its nice but in other cases you have to write a simple math function as 10 nodes and you hate life at that point. >>39222 my bet is legacy code. Maintaining old systems is a 50+ niche field because new grads dont learn old languages in university so oldtimers have zero competition from youth.

>im sure most of us make a living developing B2B applications anon this is an anime tech imageboard, I'm a dead broke lisp hacker and so are the majority here if we're being realistic

>>39222 I recall an anon a long time ago here talking about automated reverse engineering, which I was not aware was even a thing.

I don't hear enough about biorobotics. Things like prosthetics, animal robots, enhancements via robotics etc... While more popular and already tapped a fair bit, I'd go as far as including some VR projects into that field. Thing like the glove controllers that simulates your hand. The VR vests that simulates impacts and sensations. They are tied so closely with how the human body moves and interact that I lack the words to classify it into a field other than biorobotics. (If someone knows a better field to categorize it, feel free to correct me.)

>>39237 haptics "too short" fine have a copypasta: Haptic technology uses vibration, motors, or other physical experiences to simulate the sense of touch and deliver tactile experiences to digital products

>>39229 For me, the advantage of VPLs is that there's no, or at least way fewer, syntax-related bugs. An embarrassing number of issues in my code have come from me writing technically valid code that doesn't actually do the thing I want because I went on autopilot and forgot a punctuation mark. That's really not an issue in VPLs; you have the entire syntax of the language laid bare to you in the editor, and small mistakes stand out more because they have a greater effect on the shape of your code. I'd honestly love to see an IDE that lets you edit traditional textual code in a visual way. It shouldn't be hard to display, for instance, C, in Scratch-esque blocks.

>>39254 syntax related bugs in graphs are wrong connections. I dont think spotting a wrong connection is easier than finding a typo in code. You need either way to understand the entire thing and figure out the difference between what you want and what is there.

>>39222 I think distributed systems engineering is a pretty good example. The rules are totally different from operating on a single machine, and it's not something you can just learn easily since it is really about making things work at a scale you can't afford to replicate or simulate. It's totally alien from the kind of CRUD soykaf that regular software engineers deal with.

>>39222 I work on a static analyzer based on abstract interpretation. It's fun.

>>39264 It's not really "niche or relatively untapped." There's a lot of literature on it and plenty of work in it (though the work mostly is like kicking dead whales down the beach because its a lot of "management got enamored with kubernetes and now devops is realizing how badly it is like kicking dead whales down the beach to work with"). And you're expected to at least be familiar with some general distributed systems concepts in modern programming jobs. You won't be writing your own distributed messaging queue or consensus algorithms anything, but you're expected to understand the concepts enough to use them and work with microservices (or whatever distributed architecture is in vogue).

>>39568 How does one get a job like that? I find static analysis (and formal methods in general) super interesting, but job ads for them seem very rare.