Re:Everyone is still terrible at creating software at scale
by tracerbulletx on Saturday April 10, 2021 @05:44PM
(#26765419)
It would also be nice to look at the efficiency of software engineering and business practices from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and 30 years ago and realize just how far we've come. Software is running more things, bigger things, more important things, more complicated things, and we get better all the time, it's ok to live in an imperfect world and just make things a little better every day. Its ok to try things, find they're suboptimal and make changes, it's ok to retry things that have been done before but with a new spin.
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Re:Everyone is still terrible at creating software at scale
by kaba0 on Wednesday April 14, 2021 @02:18AM
(#26803567)
How far have we come? I think the answer is sort of disappointingly at most a small constant factor.
The thing is, most software projects have an inherent complexity that can’t be reduced. This gives an implicit limit on what can be reasonably created by humans.
And most software is insanely complex — simply because otherwise they would not be useful in many cases. So writing software from scratch takes pretty much the same amount of time as it did 10 or 20 years ago. Yeah performance is much better both in hardware and in software (runtime, compiler), but eg. desktop app development may have become less productive since. All in all, there is No Silver Bullets, and there haven’t been since either. The only thing there is is incorporating already existing software.