>What if the friction of authoring software was reduced to the point that the easiest output of "analyze" was .. working software?

Well, the software world is certainly working hard - on one side - to reasonably attain this goal, while another big portion of it actively resists this advancement in human social services, such that it represents.

Perhaps that is the key thing to all of this: "Until all of us are using waterfall, many of us will have a hard time using waterfall." I'm not sure I like where this leads, so I'll just agree with you that sometimes you just have to crash rockets.

> actively resists this advancement in human social services,

> "Until all of us are using waterfall, many of us will have a hard time using waterfall.

Now you've lost me, I've no idea what you're talking about with the first statement and the latter just sounds like cultism? People have valid reasons for iterative processes!

It goes like this: for as long as we are incompletely applying waterfall, someone else will attempt to refactor the natural process and call it something else, instead of just recognizing and then completing the waterfall process. This will be the state of things until either a) everyone abandons waterfall and/or calls it something else or b) waterfall is just so well understood as a natural law of the industry.

So its really more of a self-fulfilling prophecy situation, and yes in that regard, we are in a cult.

This is just "communism can never fail, it can only be failed" but for Waterfall.

Inasmuch as software development and communism are both social services, yes.

Bad software fails to deliver on the social promise. As does any particularly bad political philosophy.

Over time all political philosophy has failed to deliver on promises, because people. Same is probably true of software because, people.