for a better idea why the state of art is actually much less terrible than it appears to idealists.
"I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.
If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet."
I'm a bit unconvinced, since specification, design, and testing could be fundamentally different and vastly improved from the way they are now, not just the area of syntax errors.
Whenever you manage to make a specification "simpler" when there are in fact a lot of implementation details you're giving away the chance to modify the behavior of the stuff that is implied.
E.g. think why Google just doesn't buy Oracle servers instead of developing all their software infrastructure -- they wouldn't be able to provide the service they do and they wouldn't earn anything. Whenever you decide that you "don't care" you didn't really remove complexity, you just decided to accept the way the system behaves by default with all the limitations that come from that.
Idealists think that a lot of the details can be "abstracted away" just because they'd rather not think about them, but they are still there and they make the difference.
No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3068513
for a better idea why the state of art is actually much less terrible than it appears to idealists.
"I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems.
If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet."