Why is it still so hard to write software?
- by nornagon
Writing software, I find, is composed of two parts:
the Idea, and
the Implementation.
The Idea is about thinking: "I have this problem; how do I solve it?" and further, "how do I solve it elegantly?" The answers to these questions are obtainable by thinking about algorithms and architecture. The ideas come partially through analysis and partially through insight and intuition.
The Idea is usually the easy part. You talk to your friends and co-workers and you nut it out in a meeting or over coffee. It takes an hour or two, plus revisions as you implement and find new problems.
The Implementation phase of software development is so difficult that we joke about it. "Oh," we say, "the rest is a Simple Matter of Code." Because it should be simple, but it never is.
We used to write our code on punch cards, and that was hard: mistakes were very difficult to spot, so we had to spend extra effort making sure every line was perfect. Then we had serial terminals: we could see all our code at once, search through it, organise it hierarchically and create things abstracted from raw machine code.
First we had assemblers, one level up from machine code. Mnemonics freed us from remembering the machine code. Then we had compilers, which freed us from remembering the instructions. We had virtual machines, which let us step away from machine-specific details.
And now we have advanced tools like Eclipse and Xcode that perform analysis on our code to help us write code faster and avoid common pitfalls.
But writing code is still hard. Writing code is about understanding large, complex systems, and tools we have today simply don't go very far to help us with that. When I click "find all references" in Eclipse, I get a list of them at the bottom of the window. I click on one, and I'm torn away from what I was looking at, forced to context switch. Java architecture is usually several levels deep, so I have to switch and switch and switch until I find what I'm really looking for -- by which time I've forgotten where I came from. And I do that all day until I've understood a system. It's taxing mentally, and Eclipse doesn't do much that couldn't be done in 1985 with grep, except eat hundreds of megs of RAM.
Writing code has barely changed since we were staring at amber on black. We have the theoretical groundwork for much more advanced tools, tools that actually work to help us comprehend and extend the complex systems we work with every day.
So why is writing code still so hard?
