> I alternate between thinking that programming has improved tremendously in the past 30 years, and thinking that programming has gone nowhere. Anyone who thin

> I alternate between thinking that programming has improved tremendously in the past 30 years, and thinking that programming has gone nowhere. Anyone who thinks it hasn't improved should take a look at the description of the program used as an example in David Parnas's classic 1972 paper 'On the Criteria to be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules' ( https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/criteria.pdf https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/crit... ) It's a KWIC (keyword in context) program and he says a competent programmer should be able to code it in a week. These days it's about 5-10 minutes in Ruby or Perl.