Why is software development still so hard?

Total experience to date: thirty-one years.

Started with UCSD Pascal and Z80 assembler. Currently into Haskell and Prolog and anything functional. Putting all that to one side, as we all know that the language you use to implement a solution is by and large irrelevant, no really, you know it is… I find myself lately finding it harder and harder to want to embark on any sort of personal project.

A mere twenty years ago I was brimming with enthusiasm for it but these days I just find myself wanting to watch cat videos on YouTube.

Initially...

I was spell-bound (and to some extent still am) at the age of eleven that you could “express an idea” in the language that the computer could understand, be it BASIC or whatever was available and then sometime later have that idea executing. Of course, the idea has to be information processing centric; that’s what the infernal machines do so well.

Eventually...

I realised that you could express solutions using any number of techniques ranging from things like Forth, OO with C++ or functional like Haskell or OCaml. And of course there is LISP, which basically does all of the above and from which languages continue to steal their latest batch of “new” features.

Ultimately...

One realises that none of it matters. What matters is the logical process of teasing out “the solution” from “the requirements”. So why oh why are there new languages appearing more and more? Yes, we are headed into the future heavily into parallelism, concurrency and fault tolerance and new languages promise to deliver those things. But until that happens, what about the poor clients who just want working solutions?

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