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Software
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Microsoft and Philip Kahn of Borland, along with intuitive applications
such as the spreadsheet invented by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston and
made popular by Lotus Corporation. Today all computers have elegant
WYSIWYG, ‘What You See Is What You Get’ interfaces, where you drag
and drop elements into place on the screen. Over the last 25 years writing
software has sped up and stopped being tedious – becoming almost a joy!
In No Silver Bullet, Brooks explains that writing software can’t be
accelerated any further because all the tedious mechanical tasks have
already been removed. Remember his analogy: Writing software is like
building a house, but with some important differences. With a house,
an architect handles the design and then turns over construction to
a building company. Construction takes an appreciable time, more
time than the design and quite a bit more effort. But in software the
construction is totally automated. When we complete the design for a
piece of software we press compile on the computer and the software
is built and tested automatically in a matter of seconds. Speeding this
process up any further would make only a tiny improvement in the
overall software creation time, since the process is already 99% design
and 1% building. For the most part, the creative process of writing
software cannot be improved through mechanical means.
This is not always the case. I recently upgraded the machines for
some developers I work with. We added solid state hard drives. Compiling
a program now takes only 10 seconds, compared with 6 minutes before.
Because programmers nowadays tend to compile their programs very
regularly we estimate this saves them as much as an hour a day. This is
the only real innovation I have seen in the build phase of software in the
last 5 years, and it’s arguably not an innovation at all. We just forgot to
keep on top of the build time and allowed it to get out of hand.
You might argue some counter examples. Modern software design
suites let you drag and drop things on the screen to make applications
or build a website. Two hundred million people have managed to put
together WordPress websites using this technique. These are mechanical
procedures for solving a programming task and seem to contradict my
argument. They allow us to lay out graphics, press a button and turn the
design into software. But they perform very simple tasks. The computer
simply notes the coordinates of each box on the screen and places those
numbers into a file. The process is entirely mechanical and could be
performed by a clerk with no programming knowledge following a set
of rules. The computer just does it faster. I did the clever work; I had the

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