Ask HN: Has there been a "software crisis" since the 60s?
"In the mid-sixties we observed what was then known as "the software failure" or "the software crisis". Its emergence was no surprise, its occurrence had been predicted. In not much more than ten years the power of commonly available computers had increased by a factor of thousand, and our programming ability had not increased in proportion. Besides that, the logically simple, sequential machines of the fifties had been replaced by much more complicated pieces of equipment, complicated by such features as multi-level stores and asynchronously active peripherals. It was very clear that the programming task was outgrowing our programming capacities and the emergence of the software crisis was, as said, no surprise. The problem, however, was that very little could be done about it, as long as its existence was hardly admitted or even denied: it is vain to urge a world to try to improve its programming habits as long as that world pretends that its programming habits are perfectly adequate."
My first instinct is to say "you ain't seen nothing yet!", but I was surprised to see this problem being called a crisis as early as the 60s. I'm curious what perceptions other people have of this.
I never had the perception of a 'crisis' in the 90s, but the described problem has very obviously accelerated over the course of my career. I remember the days when a living could evidently be made producing those thick tomes of coding knowledge that would be completely impractical for anyone to write these days - technology moves far too fast to maintain anything like that.
It makes me wonder if I saw the end of one 'wave' at the start of my career and the start of another, or if we've been in one big accelerating crisis for more than 60 years.