While I am a big critic of current software development tools and believe they are nowhere near what they could be, I also believe that there will never be anyt

While I am a big critic of current software development tools and believe they are nowhere near what they could be, I also believe that there will never be anything that makes software development easy. The reason is that software is a tri-component system: how to do something via computation, how to communicate between people, and how to think about something. We are actually somewhat decent at the first. We are absolutely terrible at the last two. Again, I think there's a lot we can do to improve things, but we will always be pushing against the ceiling of humans to communicate, collaborate, and accurately encode a domain of knowledge. If one thinks of software programs as stored knowledge, then it makes sense why they are so buggy, error prone, etc. It's that the knowledge was never complete to begin with. Throw in the difficulties of computation, and you have the mess that is the software landscape.