- Author
- Mark Seemann
- Published
- 1 July 2019
- Kind
- Personal blog post, argued from experience
- Original
- blog.ploeh.dk/2019/07/01/yes-silver-bullet/
- Subject
- Software design
What it is
Mark Seemann is a software developer who writes the ploeh blog. The post says people misread Brooks as claiming no improvement is possible. It argues that several large improvements have appeared since 1986.
What it says
- Seemann says people misread Brooks's essay as saying there is no panacea.
- The post says Brooks's actual claim rests on essential versus accidental complexity.
- Seemann disputes Brooks's view that accidental complexity is now half or less of the total.
- Seemann says the Web raised the author's own productivity more than tenfold.
- Seemann says automated testing is easily a factor ten improvement.
- Git, garbage collection and agile methods are called significant, but probably not tenfold.
- Seemann conjectures that statically typed functional programming could be another tenfold gain.
What evidence it gives
The evidence is personal experience, such as years of reverse engineering a closed framework. The post says it is all anecdotal and that software cannot be measured. Two code samples compare a C# method signature with a Haskell type.
Interests and limits
The page promotes the author's books, courses and consulting. The tenfold figures are estimates with no measurements behind them. The author labels the functional programming claim as conjecture. The comments add a short disagreement about whether software is complex.