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.
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.