Software development: should we stop? Maybe we should
There&#x27;s a lot of false premises and a lot of things that don&#x27;t follow in this.<p>&gt; Maybe the most marvellous, utopian idea for software was Unix program design, in the mid-1970s. This is the idea that programs will all talk together via unstructured streams of text.<p>It was a great idea in the 1970&#x27;s. But we had OLE and COM and CORBA and GNOME and KDE and now PowerShell where you can load .NET assemblies and pass around structured objects in the same process. We&#x27;ve had Cocoa which exposed Smalltalk style control of objects in applications since the 1980&#x27;s.<p>This isn&#x27;t a problem of technology. It&#x27;s a problem of incentives. It&#x27;s the same incentives that drive programs to try to look different from each other instead of fitting smoothly into a set of user interface guidelines. It requires a producer of software to find it beneficial to them to fit into the ecosystem around them.<p>&gt; The promise of a computer is to reveal truth, through a seamless flow of information.<p>Seamless flow of information requires connecting the underlying semantic domains. Semantic domains rarely exactly match. Humans use enormous amounts of context and negotiation to construct language games in these situations.<p>&gt; music was around <i>forever</i> but in the 16th century, if you made music, you made it for god, or the king.<p>This is empirically false. We have records of dance music, of broadside ballads that were sung in the streets, of the music people played at home. And there were lots of student drinking songs about being young and free.<p>I think the real solution to the author&#x27;s angst is to go study the field more broadly and get out of whatever ghetto they are living in.