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> Brooks dared to predict that thirty years later, software would still be created by programmers sitting in front of editors, painstakingly typing up code bran

by ken 7y ago

> Brooks dared to predict that thirty years later, software would still be created by programmers sitting in front of editors, painstakingly typing up code branches for all of the scenarios a given program is supposed to handle. Did I miss this? The thesis says it's about what will happen "within a decade" of 1986 -- "as we look to the horizon of a decade hence". He makes no projections beyond that, that I see, and the timeline seems specifically chosen to suggest that further large improvements are still possible but will take time.

jerf 7y ago
We've made massive progress on the accidental complexity. That's what a lot of the "bloat" is that people complain about, and why even though I am a bit sympathetic to that, it's only a bit. There's a reason that, for instance, Electron is so popular, and that reason is a lot of Electron apps would not be paragons of efficiency if Electron didn't exist, they would simply not exist at all, or with a greatly reduced feature set or greatly higher expense. Improving the essential complexity has not moved much at all, which is why my computer science education from 24 years ago is still pretty much the same one people get now and hasn't lost its relevance. The removal of the accidental complexity sometimes means it's only the essential complexity left shining through. In that sense, while he may have had the humility to time-bound his predictions to a mere decade, they've still stayed fresh much longer than that. (Reading the entire Mythical Man Month in 201x is a bizarre experience; all the specific tech references are so dated that they are more myth than fact now, yet, the underlying points those references are in support of are still quite fresh. Arguably a bit incomplete now, we have teams of a scale well beyond what they had then, sitting on piles of software yet larger, but still correct at the core.)

by ken 7y ago

jerf 7y ago

We've made massive progress on the accidental complexity. That's what a lot of the "bloat" is that people complain about, and why even though I am a bit sympathetic to that, it's only a bit. There's a reason that, for instance, Electron is so popular, and that reason is a lot of Electron apps would not be paragons of efficiency if Electron didn't exist, they would simply not exist at all, or with a greatly reduced feature set or greatly higher expense. Improving the essential complexity has not moved much at all, which is why my computer science education from 24 years ago is still pretty much the same one people get now and hasn't lost its relevance. The removal of the accidental complexity sometimes means it's only the essential complexity left shining through. In that sense, while he may have had the humility to time-bound his predictions to a mere decade, they've still stayed fresh much longer than that. (Reading the entire Mythical Man Month in 201x is a bizarre experience; all the specific tech references are so dated that they are more myth than fact now, yet, the underlying points those references are in support of are still quite fresh. Arguably a bit incomplete now, we have teams of a scale well beyond what they had then, sitting on piles of software yet larger, but still correct at the core.)