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Comment by reyan | Hacker News Reader

I think the author should read Fred Brooks's "No Silver Bullet". Many of his arguments are still valid after 28 years. "There is no single development, in either technology or in management technique, that by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."

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"No Silver Bullet" reminds me of the physicists at turn of century claiming that Newtonian physics held all of the answers. He blames the issues in software engineering on bad programmers, instead of questioning his field. His narrow minded, defeatist arguments fail to recognize the full potential of computer science. I don't buy his argument that Java or JavaScript have eliminated most of the accidental complexity in programming. It's like Von Neumann claiming, “I don’t see why anybody would need anything other than machine code.

Computer Science is still in its infancy. We haven't reached the full potential of Von Neumann architecture, let alone the dozens of non-Von Neumann systems that have been largely ignored by academia. Recent advances in neuroscience may open up a whole new model for information processing, such as IBM's SyNAPSE project.[1] Have you watched Bret Victor's, "The Future of Programming"?[2] He does a wonderful job of countering many of Fred Brooks's points.

[1] https://www.research.ibm.com/cognitive-computing/neurosynapt...

[2] http://worrydream.com/dbx/

Yes I have watched Bret Victor's talk. Narrow minded or not, Brooks's predictions held true for more than a decade after the time of writing. I'd like to read your counter-arguments.

I'd say architecture and advances in neuroscience are tangential here. I think the core of the problem is still somewhere else.

* sidenote: Lisp machines weren't at least completely _ignored_ by academia.

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