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This essay is an opinion piece: It claims that little accidental complexity is left and most software complexity is essential. It does not really establish its
by Peaker 9y ago
This essay is an opinion piece: It claims that little accidental complexity is left and most software complexity is essential. It does not really establish its claim that the complexity is essential, yet the entire premise rests on that.
I find that proposition preposterous: I believe almost all complexity we deal with in software is accidental.
- syncsynchalt 9y agoAnd yet 30 years later the predictive claim has held up.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Peaker 9y agoDid it? We are making many kinds of software easily an order of magnitude faster than we did 30 years ago.
- syncsynchalt 9y agoThe claim is within one decade, though. So it'd be compared to 2007, not 1987. The other claim is that we'll won't see a 2x gain in software every 2 years. Keep in mind this was in the era of AI promises, when this kind of claim seemed less bizarre. Incidentally, what software did you have in mind? I'm curious if you mean something like rails (stand up an API in ten minutes), or machine learning.
- Peaker 9y agoI mean both UIs (not specifically rails) and machine learning, and emulators, and CRUD, and even software like compilers which was already well-researched by then. These days a compiler can be whipped up by an expert in a day or two (for small languages).