[bunderbunder]

I think a lot of it is essential. At its core, programming is about designing processes and procedures, and I'm not aware of any sphere in which the state of the art inspires much hope. Certainly not law, business or accounting.

But I also think there's a lot of value in continuing to try new things. This complexity is so expensive that the payoff from a successful project could be enormous. And even when projects fail, we can often learn a lot from understanding how they fail. See that recent HN discussion on literate programming for an interesting example.