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The supposition was attributed to Kay: "Alan Kay speculates in this talk that 99% or even 99.9% of the effort that goes into creating a large software system i

The supposition was attributed to Kay: "Alan Kay speculates in this talk that 99% or even 99.9% of the effort that goes into creating a large software system is not productive." This is the claim. Without in any way diminishing the astonishing accomplishments of the STEPS team, let's remember that they've spent (are spending) five years to write 20K lines of code. This doesn't sound like the level of effort is 1000 (or 100, or possibly even 10) times less for what they've accomplished than it would have been had they implemented exactly the same functionality in, say, Java. Would the Java code have been 1000 times bigger? It seems quite likely that it would have! But the bulkiness of the end product's source code doesn't determine the amount of effort that went into building it. Could it be that they spent four and a half years figuring this new system out, and a few weeks writing the 20K lines of source? It could; I haven't read most of their papers. If that was the case, then that's what needs to be pointed out to refute the assumption that they're spending as much or almost as much effort on the end product (but with astonishingly little source code required to specify it).

gruseom 15y ago
You do have a good point that one should consider not just the code size but the effort to get there (though let's not forget the effort to maintain and extend it over time). But are you sure you're framing it correctly? It seems unfair to compare the effort it takes to pioneer a fundamentally new approach to the effort it takes to implement a common one. That's like comparing the guys who have to cut a tunnel through mountain rock to the ones who get to drive through it later. We have no idea how easy it might get to build new systems their way once the relevant techniques were absorbed by industry. The founding project is no basis for predicting that, other than that historically these things get far easier as the consequences are worked out over time. What we do know from general research (at least, I've read this many times - anyone know the source?) is that programmer effort tends to be about the same per line of code. That's one reason everyone always cites for higher-level languages being better. Maybe that result doesn't hold up here, but it seems like a reasonable baseline.

gruseom 15y ago

You do have a good point that one should consider not just the code size but the effort to get there (though let's not forget the effort to maintain and extend it over time). But are you sure you're framing it correctly? It seems unfair to compare the effort it takes to pioneer a fundamentally new approach to the effort it takes to implement a common one. That's like comparing the guys who have to cut a tunnel through mountain rock to the ones who get to drive through it later. We have no idea how easy it might get to build new systems their way once the relevant techniques were absorbed by industry. The founding project is no basis for predicting that, other than that historically these things get far easier as the consequences are worked out over time. What we do know from general research (at least, I've read this many times - anyone know the source?) is that programmer effort tends to be about the same per line of code. That's one reason everyone always cites for higher-level languages being better. Maybe that result doesn't hold up here, but it seems like a reasonable baseline.