> The bigger question is, why are we still programming the way we did 20yrs ago? It's been a problem longer than that, and the culprit (ironically) is Fred Bro

> The bigger question is, why are we still programming the way we did 20yrs ago? It's been a problem longer than that, and the culprit (ironically) is Fred Brooks. Yes, the guy we hand the "I didn't get a Turing award, all I got was this lousy Fred Brooks award" T-shirt to people. If you don't know, Fred Brooks was the manager of the first large scale programming project at IBM that actually tried to use a programming language, as opposed to machine code/assembler and the toolset and paradigms people used with that approach. Anyway, long story short, the project was deemed a "failure", and this Fred Brooks guy, presumably in a bit of ego-damage control and to save his professional reputation, did something interesting: he claimed that anyone would have failed, not just him, and that there is no possible solution to the problem that fundamentally fixes it. (Literally: "there is no silver bullet.") Well, Brook's knee-jerk proclamation about killed all research into the "programming is hard" problem at the academic level. People now strive for x% improvement but firmly believe--after literally one bad experience--that fundamental improvement is impossible. But maybe, just maybe, we're "doing it wrong" as it were and we were wrong to give up after literally one bad experience by a pointy-headed boss in CYA mode on a major project. I firmly believe that we're doing programming wrong, that Fred Brooks was (and is) wrong, and that 50 years from now, we'll look back at a million monkeys (referring to myself) typing out text to the computer and laugh at how primitive we all are today.