3 ms·

Yes, it is incredible. (Edit: ah okay, not the assertion I thought of) And they mostly did it. Conclusion: there is a silver bullet. If you can do a second d

Yes, it is incredible. (Edit: ah okay, not the assertion I thought of) And they mostly did it. Conclusion: there is a silver bullet. If you can do a second draft with 10 times less code, then at least 90% of the first draft's complexity was accidental. By definition, so to speak. The question of avoiding that accidental complexity at the first try is a separate question. The VPRI did find particular abstractions, embodied in their various Domain Specific Languages. Implicit parallelism (not concurrency) was tested in one of their languages (Nile), for 2.5 drawing. The problem was embarrassingly parallel to begin with, but they only had to modify the runtime to parallelize it (30 times faster with 40 cores). I also believe they have some form of implicit concurrency. Also, it doesn't matter if they didn't invent some new ground-breaking abstraction. Because they just showed that applying the right old ideas in a systematic ways can have a tremendous effect. Now the industry just have to wake up.

hxa7241 15y ago
> The question of avoiding that accidental complexity at the first try is a separate question. But is that not the more important question? -- how much effort it takes to design software (which surely is the gist of Brooks' observation). If the final code is much smaller, yet it took as long to design/write, what has been gained? Something, certainly (easier to manipulate, reuse), and furthermore there must be a fairly good relation between size and effort, yet it is the effort to create that is the key matter here.
- rwallace 15y ago
  Is the effort to create, really the key matter? Typically most of the cost is incurred in other activities, such as maintenance of software after the initial release.
  - loup-vaillant 15y ago
    Not always, but there is software that you write once, and then forget. For some shops (proprietary and custom software, mostly), the cost of the first try is what counts most. Nevertheless, I addressed that effort to create: geniuses write languages, and the rest of us use them. And with sufficiently good compilation languages, I bet we wouldn't need a genius to implement a worthwhile language.

hxa7241 15y ago

> The question of avoiding that accidental complexity at the first try is a separate question. But is that not the more important question? -- how much effort it takes to design software (which surely is the gist of Brooks' observation). If the final code is much smaller, yet it took as long to design/write, what has been gained? Something, certainly (easier to manipulate, reuse), and furthermore there must be a fairly good relation between size and effort, yet it is the effort to create that is the key matter here.

rwallace 15y ago
Is the effort to create, really the key matter? Typically most of the cost is incurred in other activities, such as maintenance of software after the initial release.
- loup-vaillant 15y ago
  Not always, but there is software that you write once, and then forget. For some shops (proprietary and custom software, mostly), the cost of the first try is what counts most. Nevertheless, I addressed that effort to create: geniuses write languages, and the rest of us use them. And with sufficiently good compilation languages, I bet we wouldn't need a genius to implement a worthwhile language.