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by matwood
1081 days ago
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> Then you must have a pretty narrow view of the problem space. Quite a lot of problems have a pretty well defined set of requirements that can fit on one page. If this is true, then these problems are already solved. And, given the nature of software, they do not need to be solved again. The reality is that every single piece of software ends up being unique at the edges. It's what makes software great, but also so challenging. It's also these edges that take your 1 page of requirements and turn them into an ambiguous, conflicting set of 50 pages. |
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There's a lot of induced demand in software development. We have spent the last 70 years on incredible productivity improvements through better tooling, language design, frameworks, etc. But all that has done is create more demand, both for functionality and usability. Now that animations are cheap to add to UIs, people want to have them. Automating tasks that can be done quite cheaply by humans is becoming cost effective in ever more fields. Software of complexity that would be unimaginable in the 50s is used for purposes as mundane as many-to-many short messages.
Lots of software is unique, but at the same time there's also lots of software or software features that just recently became cheap enough to implement to be worth doing. And those can sometimes be quite simple in their requirements.