Re:Why don’t software development methodologies work?
by acdha on Monday February 10, 2014 @02:41PM
(#7213188)
Things which are a LOT easier:
1. Interactive editing
2. Interactive compilation (these two are probably the biggest reason programmers now are more productive)
3. Having enough storage for most problems
4. Having enough computation to solve most problems interactively
5. Handling numbers larger than one machine word
6. Handling floating point numbers
7. Handling precise decimal numbers (except for the lucky few using mainframes / COBOL)
8. Handling text using characters which wouldn't have worked in a telegram
9. Exchanging text with other systems (you couldn't even assume ASCII with other encodings (e.g. EBCDIC) being common)
10. Tracking changes to source code
11. Distributing shared code and tracking new releases
12. Communicating with other systems
We've gotten a lot better on various technical details. The parts which remain difficult are generally different aspects of human limitations reasoning about complex systems.
1. Interactive editing 2. Interactive compilation (these two are probably the biggest reason programmers now are more productive) 3. Having enough storage for most problems 4. Having enough computation to solve most problems interactively 5. Handling numbers larger than one machine word 6. Handling floating point numbers 7. Handling precise decimal numbers (except for the lucky few using mainframes / COBOL) 8. Handling text using characters which wouldn't have worked in a telegram 9. Exchanging text with other systems (you couldn't even assume ASCII with other encodings (e.g. EBCDIC) being common) 10. Tracking changes to source code 11. Distributing shared code and tracking new releases 12. Communicating with other systems
We've gotten a lot better on various technical details. The parts which remain difficult are generally different aspects of human limitations reasoning about complex systems.