Why do web sites and software take so long to build? And why is it so hard?

brilliant comment in the original post, just in case anybody missed it

"When I had my bathroom remodelled, at first I thought it was organized amazingly well and why couldn’t software be like that? There was a designer from Expo, a primary contractor and subcontractors for tiling, painting, etc. a project workbook containing all the documents, including the design, and a logbook for every contractor to record their visit. But it turned out to be just like a software project.

As soon as they started ripping up the walls, the painstakingly drawn design for the tub/shower was hastily and arbitrarily adjusted because the casing for an outside fire extinguisher was in the way. Many of the components turned out to be incompatible with each other and many were not the ones originally ordered (the bathtub was not even the one labelled on its box!)

Communication was terrible – the city inspector would tell the primary contractor to change something, and then a subcontractor would show up and ask me what he was supposed to do. When there was a disagreement about whether the tiling was done properly, one of the contractors disfigured the tiling to force another contractor to redo it. They all had other projects, so for long stretches I had a pile of dirt (for the cement) in my patio and a non-functioning bathroom for months. And toward the end there were some quick patches, e.g. the walls were slightly curved so edges of the tiles looked bad and they just painted the patches, which worked but cost me extra. And a couple of years later when the tub sprung a leak, the plumber couldn’t figure out how to get in there, said they must have done a shoddy job on connecting the pipes, then when he finally got a good look at it, realized why they did it that way. It was exactly like a software project!"

My opinion?

Because as much as the software industry loves to adopt the work "engineer", almost none of the sort of websites and software discussed here on HN ever gets anything much like "engineering" in the sense of, say, "civil engineering" done.

I think in my ~20year career, I've had only 3 projects that were specified well enough up front that we just "built it according to the plans" and had a satisfied customer at the end. Overwhelmingy, some (or most) of the design gets "made up as we go along". Even on projects with several small forests worth of up-front documentation, there's almost always large areas of vagueness or outright contradictory requirements, which need decision making on the developers part halfway into the job.

There are _very_ few websites that couldn't be coded from the ground up in a few weeks with a few good programmers - _IF_ you had already thought through all of the things the site needs and all of the consequences and the contradictions in those consequences. Even the big ugly complex projects, like Google's search or Facebook or Wikipedia or Twitter - if you had a spec that answered all the details about how you wanted them, a small team of experienced web guys could get it up and running in a month or so, and let you now how much cloud/hardware/sysadmin/support you'd need to budget for as your customer acquisition kicked in.

It doesn't take very long to "build" the software or the website (obvious "large scale" projects like OSes excepted). What takes most of the time is identifying and solving the problem. (And, I suspect a lot of the reason software/websites have a reputation for taking "so long" is that they're _way_ too often rushed into the "building" phase way before all the things that need designing are even identified, then all the new solutions take longer 'cause we try to fit them around all the work that's already been done.)

You know, it's really easy to build a car.

All you need is wheels, brakes, a frame, a power source, a transmission, some fuel, and some crap to connect the power to the transmission to the wheels and the wheels to the frame. And a seat. Oh, and a steering wheel. Boom. Done.

You can hand-build a car by yourself over a couple days. I mean sure, the engine, transmission, frame, wheels, tires, seat, gas tank, carburetor, brakes, etc are all manufactured by hundreds of people and dozens of companies to get you to that point. But basically, you decide what components to use and how to put them together. It takes you a relatively minute amount of time to assemble them and it's much easier than trying to manufacture all the parts yourself.

Somehow, after building cars for over 200 years, both hobbyists and huge corporations find new ways to build them (and seem to enjoy themselves). They even come out with new ones every couple years and keep finding people to buy them. You'd think the general public would wise up to the fact that it's all the same thing over and over and demand our jetson cars already.

Except that software is written by machines these days. I stopped writing in assembly language after it stopped being cool in the 90's. Even still, you'd have to be hand-crafting machine code in a hex editor to really get all the machines out of the loop.

These days I write in an interpreted language using complex libraries that handle a multitude of protocol choices for me. Even if you argue that each of those tools were at one point hand-crafted, even down to the compiler, there are now development tools that help me write code, from basic code completion and tooltips to the most complex static and runtime analysis. That is machines writing software, with a human in the loop.

I am compelled to pick the following nits:

"Stuff that is made by hand is hard to make, and even more hard to make well, and tends to be less sturdy than things made by machines."

The last portion of this statement is inaccurate. Hand tools (for example) benefit in terms of usability, durability and quality when hand-made. This is why top end cutlery, wood carving chisels, etc. are typically forged by hand. This also typically applies to furniture.

"How often do you think two plumbers argue over the right way to plumb a bathroom?  Almost never!"

Also inaccurate. Clearly the author has never worked in the trades.

"Finally, can you think of any job where people are making really complex things by hand, and which requires a ton of experience and training to be good at, yet everyone and their uncle has an opinion on how long a project should take to get done?"

Pick any form of construction known to man. Budget overruns, issues with building plans, and problems with materials crop up constantly, even with modern building materials and best practices.

I call bullshit. If this guy was bored because all of his software projects were exactly the same, he should have automated their creation and reused his code so that they took an extremely short amount of time to create. Anyone who can't do that is either encountering novel problems that require decisions, or just not a good enough programmer to automate and reuse.

This is the same way I feel when programmers complain about writing "just another CRUD app." CRUD apps are in fact very difficult to write because of usability concerns. If all of your "create" screens look exactly the same no matter what is being created, that means you are making no effort as a UI designer to anticipate common creation patterns. Even assuming a cookie-cutter UI, a CRUD programmer has to properly model the concepts in data, which is not trivial either.

To date, software engineering has failed to deliver on one critical goal, which is why we are in this mess.

The world of software development needs to be divided in two -- the component creators, and the component assemblers.

To stick with the given analogy, component creators are the people inventing new kinds of plumbing: easier ways of connecting pipes, taps that don't ever drip. Component assemblers are the people fitting out bathrooms.

Creating new components is high-end engineering. It needs to happen far away from the day-to-day challenges of making a client happy.

To a large extent, this division is already present, but it doesn't go far enough. There has been amazing progress - nowadays we work on top of an incredible stack of technology that we don't have to re-invent, but so far we've not achieved the "last mile".

We'll know when we're there because component assembly (i.e. making something for a client) will start to look more like a trade.

Today, just getting a regular been-done-a-million-times-before database-driven website (or whatever), requires FAR too much low-level code. This, I think is what is meant here by "hand made". We should be snapping things together, and often we are, but suddenly you get to an awkward bit and you're back to forging a new kind of pipe joint that never existed before.

Nothing is made entirely by machines. At some point it's made by hand. The thing is software is a bit like doing clay pottery when it's not properly done. Once you add a bit of a systematic approach to it and you test is, review it, it becomes a bit closer to an industrial product.

The thing is the rest of the world is also in a state of flux. Plumbers changed materials quite a few times in the past decade which changed the fixtures a bit. So the concept is the same (ie. design patterns) but the actual material and its characteristics changed (ie. framework, programming languages) and there are different ways to put them together: welding, glue, etc (ie. APIs).

But changing some material, fixtures and binding material doesn't even compare to the kind of flexibility we have with software!

The solution for plumbers is that they always use what's current. Which makes their field as much of a fashion-driven field as ours (think about it).

But give them an existing house with multi-layer pipes and tell them to fix it and they will also comment that it's old tech and you should switch to copper or whatever.

In conclusion, I don't see how software is any different than other fields except that we are much more flexible and go with a much greater speed.

Software is at its infancy because science in general is at its infancy.

My dad would start yelling at the screen if he read this article. He runs power tool manufacturing business, that requires each product to be tested and tested to perfection. If there is a fatal flaw the entire line may need to be recalled.

The fact I can push a software update to a million users in minutes makes him green with envy.

So yes software is hard... but cost free replication is an enormous upside.

"How often do you think two plumbers argue over the right way to plumb a bathroom? Almost never!"

I don't think this guy has ever been to a construction site. The people who work for me argue about stuff like this all the goddamn time. About the most minute details like making a connection from a wall point to the drain going first straight then left, or first left then straight, and a million other things that are completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. So just like software. They also come up with the same justifications for doing it one way or another - 'oh but it'll be easier later on' (programming language nerd wars), 'this way saves work', 'this way is more robust'. Get 10 of them together and you get 11 opinions. And you know what - in the end, the best ones are the ones who don't come up with different solutions every single time, but who just get stuff done, good enough, in time and within spec. Just like software.

I was toying with the analogy of "building things" vs. "building software" the other day.

I've always felt that comparing software with architecture, building a car etc. is what people naturally reach for since it's something they're familiar with in the physical world and much of the same terminology is used.

I don't think that software is at that point, though. Physical things "play nice" together because they are part of the physical world. Materials have characteristics that are inherent and don't need to be conceived of where as the way things behave and interact in software needs to be defined and constructed entirely by humans.

I guess one could argue that happens to a certain extent in the world of materials science but ... I don't really think it holds up.

I arrived at a point where I started to think of building software as writing a novel. Once you start to use that as an analogy, it doesn't seem so weird that it's hard and takes ages, because so does writing a novel.

In a novel, one must define the entire world, and one can make the choice of using/re-using story lines or doing something original. People that trot out formulaic drivel make better money than the tortured geniuses on average, but the few tortured geniuses that manage to hit, hit it big and serve as an example to all the others.

I kind of stopped thinking about it at this point and got back to work, but I think that using that analogy, things really start to make more sense ... what do you reckon?

I think Joel Spolsky had a nice spin on this a few years back:

"Once you've written a subroutine, you can call it as often as you want. This means that almost everything we do as software developers is something that has never been done before. This is very different than what construction workers do. Herman the Handyman, who just installed a tile floor for me, has probably installed hundreds of tile floors. He has to keep installing tile floors again and again as long as new tile floors are needed. We in the software industry would have long since written a Tile Floor Template Library (TFTL) and generating new tile floors would be trivial."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/fog0000000337.html

I think getting a "DB Connection Refused" error when I clicked this link was wonderfully appropriate.

I think of software development more as an art than a science. If those questions were asked of a professional painter I think we would hear similar responses. It's all by hand, colors shapes and textures can be amazingly complex in their combinations, standards would only inhibit a true artist, and a painter usually has no idea at all when a masterpiece might come forth. So my answer to "Why is is so hard?" would be, "because it's art." And "why do we keep doing it?" "Cause we're artists, and people enjoy art."

I think wanting a product cheaper and faster is a pretty universal sentiment. I think it can also be said that aside from cooking a meal or buying IKEA furniture, the typical consumer purchases a product that's ready to go with no assembly or lead time required. I like to think that if my (ordinary non-commercial) client assumes something is easily done, that's a compliment to my work. He or she can ask for a new button with a simple function to be added to a page, but they have no comprehension of the complexity behind adding what they see to be a simple element. To the ordinary or non-technical person, there is a lot of "magic" behind what we do (it's just a button, why can't you just add it in?). That lack of understanding combined with how easily we've solved other (seemingly similar) problems gives them no way to properly gauge how long a task should take or what it should cost.

This may be somewhat controversial to say on HN, but writing software isn't as hard as this post makes it out to be. Yes, there are disciplines in computer science that require a lot of effort, dedication and smarts to master, but the actual task of writing software isn't that hard. It can be frustrating, but I won't describe it as "so hard".

After all, you're really just describing to a machine, the idea(s), design or algorithm(s) you need it to implement. And we have languages, tools, processes, practices (etc) to make this task easier. Yes, it can get frustrating at times but a lot of other professions can be just as frustrating. By the way, if you think building websites is hard, you should try writing code to run on some electro-mechanical system, like a robot.

I'm not sure I understand the author's definition of "handmade." My Rails web app runs on my handmade code with a bunch of handmade Ruby libraries, on the handmade Ruby language, on physical hardware that was made by handmade machines (or machines made by handmade machines, etc.). How is software any more handmade than any man-made technology, like a cellphone or automobile? The distinction sounds necessarily fuzzy.

Wow, thought-provoking post! I had three reactions to this.

1) Software is in it's early days (in the grand scheme of things.) Though things may seem "hand-made" now, it won't always be the case. In fact I'd say OO, design patterns, frameworks, cloud technologies and more are the early equivalents of regulations, well-accepted standards, etc.

2) What other profession is as egalitarian? What other profession has as much upside? Entire industries can be changed by a few smart people. That kind of opportunity makes the "hassle" worth it.

3) The hassle of having stakeholders/customers constantly wanting things faster and cheaper can easily be mitigated by being picky about what company your work, for, it's business model and it's culture. Not all software companies face that issue.

The analogy the OP establishes - building a house vs making software - is good (I've actually used it too in debates), but things are not as tightly regulated by the government as the OP claims:

* While there are certain constraints a house has to satisfy, architects do have freedom to be creative. They MUST plan such that it will resist certain standard incidents, and they have to plan it such that the floors can carry ~10x the weight you would ever expect there. These regulations vary depending on the region you live in. E.g., in Austria there is the possibility that meters of snow lie on roofs, and architects (or their structural designers) have to keep that in mind when calculating the max weight. You won't find this constraint in Portugal.

* Keeping to these constraints does not guarantee a building won't break. Constraints (like requirements) are prone to grow outdated, or be incomplete. In Austria, roofs will sometimes break down when it snows for some days in a row (4m of snow are very heavy).

* As incidents in e.g. Turkey and China show, plumbers or other construction workers can do such a bad job ("botching") that buildings just break down after some years. Governmental constraints don't assure quality. Some countries like Dubai won't let local workers unguarded near any expensive building for this exact reason - most of the times, German and other Western workforces are hired to oversee the construction process.

I think one could compare governmental constraints on construction work with requirements. A building's floor must be able to carry a weight of 100 tons, and a software system should be able to serve 1000 requests/second - I think that's comparable, and software constraints might even be easier to test.

What I think this really boils down to is that software requirements evolve much more quickly, and due to this it's not feasible to establish legal requirements - government would have to issue new requirements every week, adjusting them for technologies like nodejs. Also, how do you establish best practices for bleeding-edge technologies within weeks? Not at all. We are in a constant state of learning and experimenting.

  Plus, in the history of the world, he said, is there one
  thing you can think of that has been hand-made, and on such
  a large scale as software, that was as complex?  [I cannot
  not.]

Yes: musical compositions. The largest software projects are more complex, and take longer to complete, than symphonies. But the failure rate is probably comparable.

There are probably plenty of commercial composers who write music mostly because it’s a job they can do, and they derive a modicum of satisfaction from it. But the composers who have made history — just like the programmers who have made history — do it because they must. If they give it up, they cease to do what they were made to do.

Building software is often compared to building houses. If civil engineers can design and create a very complex bridge or dam or whatever, and it keeps working for 150 years without breaking. Why can't us software engineers make software that will work without bugs for more than 10 minutes?

Problem is, the two aren't really comparable.

A while ago someone wrote an article that we are Software Gardeners not engineers[1]. And I think that comparison is much more apt.

Software is maleable, it can change, the layers of complexity build up so high it's impossible for any one person, or team of persons, to fully understand. Even the mathematical theory of software isn't fully understood yet, and yet we are piling those little lacks of understanding on every layer of the architecture ... they add up and things become monstrous.

BUT! This is a good thing. Software isn't a physical object. I want to be able to change the specs half way through a project rather than having to wait another 50 years to design a better bridge. This makes progress quicker.

As always, when progress is quick (and easy), it is also messy.

For example: it took builders thousands of years to invent The Arch and trully revolutionize the industry. It took software only a couple of decades to go from machine code to python.

Oh and never forget, the Turing Machine was "invented" in 1948. Our lives revolve around an industry the theoretic principles of which were first defined less than 70 years ago.

[1] http://chrisaitchison.com/2011/05/03/you-are-not-a-software-...

To use the plumber analogy, we can't agree on how big the common pipes should be. They have physical limitations set by properties of water and waste. Software handles a liquid of constantly changing viscosity.

> Plus, in the history of the world, he said, is there one thing you can think of that has been hand-made, and on such a large scale as software, that was as complex?

It is a testimony to the innovation in any field that leads to tools become outdated so quickly. Easy commoditisation is directly related to the tools one has at their disposal. Creative fields like photography or movie-making also face the same issues.

Interestingly, if we are given a choice to constantly upgrade our tools then we would always prefer to. For eg: I don't find most people using the cork screw on a swiss-army knife. I would rather have a lighter multi-tool. But redesigning, testing and manufacturing a new multi-tool takes a long time.

Software has relatively speaking a much shorter lifecycle. Most of the clients recognise this and sometimes have higher expectations of the turnaround times. This leads to unintentionally short timelines or bug-ridden software.

As in any uncertain venture, it is often better to go with iterative and agile methodologies rather than a big bang approach.

I think he's got the hand-made idea wrong. Programs are machines. Writing software is the act of specifying how those machines work. I don't know any industry in which this is done by other machines. It's always manual work.

The work of a financial analyst is also entirely manual by the way.

This http://i.imgur.com/UW5rM.png I truly believe that most software developers want to solve problems, and establishing a database error is a problem that people are willing to pay for...thus, there is a class of people that are willing to do the work!

EDIT: I'm sure the db connection will come back up, but this error is the root of this discussion, in my opinion. No one wants to be yelled at, so to prevent this, we revert to what "just works" and your idea of that concept is different than mine, thus the more we can agree on standards the better off we will be for the general use case.

> To boot, when constructing buildings, the methods are so well known that one person can design (the architect) and another person can build (the carpenter, plumber, electrician)

As an architect... easier said than done.

I like the analogy of walking through a dark room with your hand on the wall. As long as your hand is on something you recognize, you know where you are in the room, what ground you've already covered, and you may have some idea of how you're going to reach the other side.

I started a rails project very meticulously. I had recently read through the 'Agile' book which closely tracks the development of the framework. I had a decent idea of what I was going to build and how.

It would be a tight ship, and code would be kept clean from start to finish. Before even starting the project, I invested a ridiculous amount of time and effort learning all the tools I would be using, evaluating every case where I had a choice between popular and well-supported tools. For each tool I chose, I thought about why using it was a good idea and how exactly it would fit into the workflow. I was determined that every commit would keep tests and documentation up to date with any code changes in that same commit.

All that is to say that I came into the project with carefully considered, but fairly rigid, opinions on most aspects of how to do the project. Perhaps not surprisingly, the other developers on the project did not share these opinions. They did things that ran against my idea of how to keep a project organized. Perhaps I also did things which ran against theirs.

Eventually, the state of disorganization reached a point that felt to me like letting go of a piece of furniture in a pitch-black room. I no longer had a sense of how the whole thing was put together. I no longer knew what all the 3rd party libraries we were using did, or why they were included in the project. I had planned to keep all libraries up to date but, for various reasons, we were falling behind in that regard and various roadblocks stood in the way of bringing things current. We had started using esoteric features of the database I didn't know very much about. I would do a deep dive of research to try and catch up my understanding, and then I'd fall farther behind in keeping my finger on the pulse of changes in the project. Soon, the codebase had dependencies on various servers in our organization that prevented me from simply running my own isolated instance of it.

I don't know a solution to this, yet. Right now I'm still trying to feel my way through that dark room.

Two comments:

1. When things don't line up like the plans in an analog project, you can just "line them up" and the original intent isn't seriously disturbed. That doesn't work in a hard-logic digital world.

2. That said, "real" projects still can come together more quickly because they are better about using interfaces and being loosely coupled than we (software developers) are. You can slightly move joists, light switches, etc, because the interfaces of how they interact with other components are better defined, and the glue code (ie wires, nails, cuts) can be trivially adjusted to make things fit and still get the desired end outputs.

#2 is partly why software "integration" projects can be hacky as hell and still work, they're just glue code for clearly defined interfaces. If we designed our internal applications with such simplicity and clearly-defined interfaces and wired them together rather than coupling them, it'd be more predictable.

Unfortunately that's really tough to do for software inventions, as there are so many new things where the interfaces might not even be able to be clearly defined.

Construction would look a lot more like software if you ordered wood but when the stack of wood showed up it was metal rods instead, or if it came pre-molded to the shape of another house.

There are just too many variables in de novo software. I used to have this debate with my old boss all the time. You either live with the reality and create new, valuable stuff, or if you want to build bridges, go write glue code for legacy systems.

I don't really find software development difficult. When you're developing applications be they web applications or some sort of enterprise widget, the majority of the work is connecting libraries together. Most of the difficulty is in dealing with the incongruities of the various APIs. As long as there is a good process in place I've found little trouble in delivering and estimating software.

As in the construction of any artifact by human means there will be bumps in the road. No amount of technology we can use today will solve that issue. It's a matter of communication and flexibility. One might speculate that great buildings such as the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building weren't so perfectly specified as to allow the construction workers to simply, "put the pieces together." Problems certainly arise and must be dealt with accordingly.

Software is no different. We still write programs that guide fighter jets to land on a tiny boat in the middle of the ocean. We've written programs that drive robots across the martian surface. And we also write programs that share our inane thoughts and activities with our friends, family, and random interested strangers. The degrees of failure are still the same and for the most part assessed accordingly: while Twitter will strive for 100% up time there is little money or life lost when it does go down. Whereas when a martian robot plummets into the side of the planet it's a big loss (and has happened). Mistakes are made in engineering. Unanticipated side-effects arise. And we do our best to deal with them as well as we can.

What distinguishes software from contemporary engineering? A couple hundred years of development at the very least. I'd say we've come a long way and have some ways to go. But if you stick with it you might find it.

I think the amazing thing about this post is it suggests an incredibly myopic view of the world. Even if you look at the most basic function of what a web site is and compare it with the non-web version, you see complexity. Billboards, magazines, newspapers, books, etc., all have incredibly complex and intricate development processes, much of which is done by hand. The tools are somewhat more standardized, but that is mostly because the technology is much, much older. You try going back to the first 50 years of those technologies and you'll find it is pretty messy.

The reality is that these things get complex and intricate because that is what the system demands. I can make a website in <1 minute. It's not hard. However, it won't stand out amongst the sea of sites out there, which kind of defeats the purpose. This is why tools that facilitate the process, while improving the quality of the final product, don't actually reduce the time it takes to build a site, because improving efficiency just raises the bar higher about what a quality site needs to be.

It takes so long, because we waste so much time rebuilding logic over and over that is neither re-usable, nor unique. Login/out, passwords, security, roles, reporting.

The app logic itself can be written itself but we spend so much time on micro-integration of libraries, or writing them ourselves that we end up wasting a lot of time on things that aren't solving a problem, rather helping to deliver it.

The important question that needs to be distinguished is:

How much R&D is involved in your project?

It doesn't matter if it is a software project or a physical project. If the percentage of unknown terrain is high, the project will become complex.

When a very progressive and innovative bridge/house needs to be build with new materials and a unknown construction etc., the project will be complex and you can't design it (completely) upfront.

For example, if your software project is just a CRUD application (without complex business logic), a qualified and experienced software developer can estimate it and deliver it on time. (There are a lot of frame works and tools already available for this kind of software. So, nobody doesn't need to reinvent the wheel.)

If the wheel is not invented yet for your problem, yes, it can take a while and your luck is in the hand of gods.

The other issue is that there are a lot of developers that can't get working any shit. But incompetent people are everywhere.

Quite an aside, but... I see many things going wrong with processes in businesses all the time. Simple processes - things like following up with me on an inquiry that I made, or correcting an invoice and sending it to me. And those get borked constantly. And almost inevitably, I get something like "oh sorry, our computers were down" or "oh, the computer made a mistake". Hrm...

But with software development we are in charge of the computer. When there's a problem with the computer, there's no ability to shrug it off or make excuses - it's our entire purpose on a project is to make the computer do stuff. Oh, no doubt we can (and do!) make excuses - the compiler versions are wrong, the tool doesn't work with this other platform, etc... but no one outside our field can even understand those problems, nor do they want to. It's just our fault, and we have to fix it.

Regular people can't see software, they really can't: for them it's a bunch of crazy numbers and letters, and incredibly boring too which is why media like movies do a montage with meaningless 3D objects and not actual code.

That's also the reason why is so easy for people to justify pirating software: is something unsubstantial, "how can it be so expensive? how can it cost more than the computer in which I'm using it? I can see the computer!" is what I hear the most...

And it gets even funnier when you consider most coders and pro users can deal with half-baked apps and find a workaround for bugs and glitches, but the average enduser, the kind that barely appreciates good quality software or how much it costs to make it is the first one to complaint when something doesn't works perfectly, even if it actually does but they are too dumb to know how to use it.

On a fundamental level the tools we have to build software are still pretty bad. If that wasn't true we wouldn't be seeing the massive increase in languages & frameworks that try to take the pain away.

It just takes time to make an entire industry work smoothly and software engineering is still a young discipline. When I look round at the innovation going on lately - the rise of alternate JVM languages, increased expressiveness in languages like Ruby, frameworks like Rails, Django, Bootstrap, Less & SASS, compile-to-JS projects like CoffeeScript & ClojureScript, renewed interest in visual programming ideas like LightTable and many more, it seems we've put our foot on the gas again. I'm pretty optimistic the programming tools of tomorrow will fix the day-to-day annoyances, leaving us more time to concentrate on the core problems.

All this discussion -- and no reference to Fred Brooks?!

A classic opinion piece on why building software will always be hard is Fred Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering” — there’s a version of this available at:

http://people.eecs.ku.edu/~saiedian/Teaching/Sp08/816/Papers...

And if you don’t agree, one of its rebuttals, “What if there’s a Silver Bullet … and the Competition Gets it First?”, by Brad Cox — with a version available at:

http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/pub/92ByteWhatIfSilverBulle...

…even gets into the idea of an “industrial revolution” for software.

Good classic reading… 8-)

I wonder what changes we might see if we insisted on teaching programming in the large upfront. For instance, instead of teaching 'public static void main,' we taught people about component oriented programming. This way, people are equipped with an understanding of the complexity involved.

I also wonder whether teaching practitioners to diagnose and identify what type of project one is dealing with might avoid blind spots when estimating projects. For instance, an LDAP project should be identified as an integration project, where one might have to deal with unexpected schema.

The real problem with software projects at the moment is we lack a proper framework to think about the nature of each project and therefore don't understand where the risks are, and properly advise clients.

A lot of good points, just a couple I thought of: Software is written to control hardware. In the end that's all a user can use. Computers are a new category of machine, they are super complex, easily reconfigurable general purpose machines. So writing softare doesn't really compare with other trades. In some sense it's like a design, but since the machine is already constructed the building of the particular machine that is the app in practice is trivial (usually, click install). If you compare to building a house,let's say the program is like the complete design. One could design a house that was reused over and over. In some degree this happens (prefab houses). But since the construction costs are high relative to the design, there is usually some room and incentive to customize, just a bit.

For a software app, if it's well written, the end product builds itself. The cost of this last step is virtually nothing. Since the design can be used repeatedly, the software development costs can be spread over a lot of end users. For example, take Excel. A "spreadsheet machine" is pretty useful, it's complicated. You could compare "spreadsheet machine" to a house (or maybe something like a tractor). Aside from tweaking, the software is done, the actual machine (a PC) is a commodity. It's a done deal, anyone who wants a "spreadsheet machine" can get one relatively cheaply. But now, since the machines are out there, along with a huge amount of cheaply distributed software (the OS,languages, compilers) everyone is tempted to make something new. How about a multimedia playback machine? Brand new things that haven't even been made before. Even though there are a bunch of general purpose tools available, it is the "newness" of the app that makes it hard to predict how long it will take to code. New problems don't have existing solutions, so no one can predict how long it will take to find them.

Also, since the actual machine is super complex, which is necessary for such a general purpose device, there is looseness in the designs, leading to many different ways of doing the same thing and inevitable bugs. There are bugs in the OS, so you are going to have bugs in your app. Think about how much more complex a PC Playing back a DVD is compared to a DVD player.

I would love to get software to visualize source code as 3d structures. As a main purpose to see its complexity, not to read or understand source code. And then put on one picture, side by side with proper scale, my system and a stadium.

This article points out the issues I have with the "software craftsmanship" movement. By definition, crafting is building by hand. When we treat software development as a "craft", we attribute too much benefit to hand-building software and lend little effort to finding ways to be more productive and efficient at software development.

As long as software is considered a craft, it will always be an expensive, laborious, and frustrating process for clients and customers. That may be great for software developers' egos and pocketbooks, but does little to improve the image of software development projects among the general public.

Is it?

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Was it hard to create this blog entry? Obviously he has a point but, in general, the abundance of predefined frameworks and libraries makes it easier to create "web sites and software". Fortunately for us (developers) at the same time user demands grow higher and higher. Web-Sites 'need' to become more dynamic, styled, responsive, ... simple CRUD 'needs' to turn into a 3-trier distributed middleware architecture.

tl;dr software complexity is a constant. Progress in easing development is compensated by increasing demands.

I worked in an oil refinery for about a half year (turnarounds). Turnarounds involved shutting down one part of the refinery for rebuilding and repairs.

A lot of the work involved pipe welding. Pipe welding pays extremely well (for a trade) and that's because it requires such consistently high performance. As a pipe welder, you have to stamp your name into every weld you do. If your weld fails, it could kill people.

They check pipe welds using an xray. If a guy's weld failed xray more than once(and usually more than 0 times), he was out of the job.

How is the code hand-made? The millions of gmail users are using the same piece of code. Same thing with Windows users. That's what you call mass production.

The article mentions that the customer always thinks it should be done faster or cheaper. I often have the opposite experience. The customer who is completely clueless and has no idea how long things take. I've had customers ask for a link to something and ask if that would be really hard to do. I think it would be really easy for a disreputable programmer to take advantage (and I'm sure many do) of these people.

Because software is nowhere near as mature as machines - give it a few decades and the process will be very automated, for sure. Even now you can build simple apps with drag-n-drop, and you can make your computer do anything you want using automation tools like Automate/WinAutomation.

Also, the whole post is a big subscribe link for me when NoScript is enabled (pretty smart, actually, if it's not a bug).

Not so sure web coding as unique as author makes out.

Hand made items - essentially think back to before the industrial age. Most things were hand made. Art, tools, food etc

Now we have machines to make things easier. Or we have off shore labour.

If it is a precise trade, well sorry but you still need to struggle by hand. You should therefore new charging a premium to do it.

Mirrored a copy here, http://jsbin.com/apawin/3

If you have an aversion to using Google cache and would like to see a clean version.

Cuz you're a frickin' amateur? It's not rocket science, it's easy to do, but it is work!

I think these meatheads are complaining because it's work...

Those are all legitimate problems with our industry. But instead of quitting, I'd prefer to try and solve them.

Is it standard/acceptable procedure to make every word in your article link to a subscription page?

You know what would make my day as webdeveloper?

1. Language that doesn't require me to connect to the external system and use new brain-dead language to do such basic thing as persisting and efficiently accessing data. How do you declare persistent array of objects that you will be wanting to access by some of their properties in your favourite language without keeping the whole thing in RAM? I'd love to have my data stored in XML if I could query it without loading the whole file into memory and if I could hint it what XPaths I'll be accessing in the future so it can create some indexes to make those accesses faster.

2. Tool that I could use to convert photoshop design to sane subset of HTML and CSS and perhaps JavaScript without manually writing text documents all by hand. Dreamweaver is just set of buttons to click to insert tags and that's not what I mean. I think of something more like a GUI designer where I could load psd, or multiple psd-s and use them as a blueprint and source of bitmaps while creating a webpage. In MS Visual Studio GUI designer has a nice thing called Anchor. It allows you to anchor borders of your component at fixed distances from borders of it's parents. If people who defined HTML standards embraced that ideas then webdevelopment of recent 10 years would be flowers and bunnies instead of franticly searching how to make the browsers actually fill the height of the parent when you say "height: 100%" (hint: you can't).

3. Tool that could present me with graphical view of what components my webapp consists of and how they are connected. Something like database diagrams but for living breathing components. It's really tiring to making sense of what your app actually does just by looking through a small hole of the size of letters in the debugger and stack trace.

4. I'd like to see, while inspecting a method, all the places in my code where this method is surely called from and all the places this method might be called from (because of inheritance, function pointers, dynamic calls etc.). Function call is the connection between component. It's really nasty that when looking at source point of the connection then you can see the destination but when looking at destination you have no idea what are the source points.

What webdevelopment lacks in my opinion are just proper (visual) tools to deal with its complexity and inconveniences. Decade or two of this crap and you really are fed up because there are less and less interesting problems to solve and same drudgery over and over. Standard component interfaces would also be nice but unless you have a generally adopted tool that favours some standard there won't be any standard. Current state of the art web-development tool is text editor with syntax highlighting and auto-complete broken to various degrees. The only thing it favours is not keeping HTML, JavaScript and CSS inside strings because then it refuses to highlight it. It does the same thing about SQL but that really doesn't bother people enough because SQL is already lost cause.

Most sites could use pre-made systems with a minor amount of look and feel tweaks. So I think a lot of it comes down to sales/con men and snobbery. And possibly programmers getting lost down rabbit holes.

It's all because developers think they are entitled to interesting problems and amazing coding.

Heck, in my day job i even have to fight to learn my damn goal. Which never is "to code" something. That's always only the means to the end. But still, every Coworker and manager start stating that as the ultimate goal of an engineer in a software department.