There's no silver bullet that can kill Count Complexity, the dreaded vampire that plagues all software development. No fancy new methodology or tool can kill him. They can help like eating garlic, or carrying a cross in your necklace, but the problem won't go away.
Why is this, how should it be? The article linked to above gives good reasons. I'd like to add to that one more viewpoint: According to "Curry-Howard -isomorphism" programming is essentially the same activity as constructing mathematical proofs. We all know that is difficult. It can be learned, and we can become better at it, and develop better tools that help. We can create "lemmas" and use known existing proofs as basis. Those are equivalent to the subroutines and libraries in software development. But we just can't kill the beast.
Having programmed for a long time that has become my viewpoint too. It is intrinsically difficult to create software worth creating. It is easy to create simple software, like proving the Pythagoras theorem, but that has been done many times already.
I've tried many programming languages, programming environments, IDEs, methodologies and they all help of course, that's why they were created and became popular. But the difficulty remains. The vampire still haunts us at night.
The only advice I can think of adding is to share the advice of my good professor Harri Jappinen. He once told me: "To create good software you must write it twice, maybe thrice".
The consequence of this advice is that if you know you want to create "good software" (not throw-away stuff) don't spend too much time on details and specifics, or even testing, on the first round. This is similar to what I wrote in a previous blog-post "Fast-and-Loose approach to Software Quality". To achieve good quality you must incrementally "tighten" the quality, over multiple rounds of re-creating your application.
© 2015 Panu Viljamaa. All rights reserved
