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Personally I feel like our software development methodologies/technologies/tools are drastically underequipped to handle the complexity of the systems we are at
by zokier 6y ago
Personally I feel like our software development methodologies/technologies/tools are drastically underequipped to handle the complexity of the systems we are attempting to build. I'd estimate we'd maybe be at the level now to handle complexity of software 30-40 years ago (i.e. 80s software), but that is not based on anything solid because in the world of software there is precious little solid to base anything of. The free lunch we have been enjoying might come to an end now that software is imbuing itself more and more to things that really matter, like human rights and safety. Electronic voting and self-driving cars come to mind as examples.
Of course another problem is that not only is software engineering still pretty immature, its use also is very unevenly distributed. While we might be able to build software somewhat reliably with state of the art tools and methods, vast majority does not use them. Not that we have much agreement on our field what constitutes unequivocally good practices. This has lead to the situation that even the basic foundational building blocks we use are usually of dubious quality.
- mstipetic 6y agoI used to think that but now I don't think we're getting better. The more I think about it the more I see that people are equally bad at it, progress only happens by building out the tooling beneath them that allow them to build more and more complicated things, without them realizing it. Developers have the capacity and willingness to work on a small part of a codebase and the rest has to be filled in by others in a similar situation and by tooling. I'm a bit biased since I run an edtech company but it's very disappointing to see how hard it is to get companies and people to actually invest in education.
- peteradio 6y agoI question the need for all this complexity.