[jacobn]

I think he understands it rather well - it's "complex simple software".

You can think of any software as consisting of a set of problems of varying degree of "difficulty". Sort them in ascending order and plot them. This graph will give a very tell-tale signature as to what you're facing.

B2B / enterprise / call it what you will software has an infinite number of individually easy but collectively mind-numbingly painful problems. Yes, a lot of that bs comes from laws/rules created by "others".

"Interesting" software has a small-ish number of very difficult problems and then a manageable number of easy ones. These are the type of problems where you can take a small team of very smart people and really knock it out of the park. They are most unfortunately very few and far between.

Social cat photo software I can't speak to. I'm certainly not implying that it's in the "interesting" bucket...

[ansgri]

Most people are thinking too narrowly of B2B, and while it may be true that business logic and accounting are dominating in number of installations / volume of sales / whatever, some very unsexy businesses (road toll collection, what could be worse!) do want most sexy science and technology. Significant fraction of computer vision studies is dedicated to vehicle recognition and classification.

[zcvosdfdgj]

No, he definitely doesn't understand what quickbooks is. He says 10million loc is an indication it has gone "horribly wrong". That tells me he doesn't have the vaguest idea what the feature set of quickbooks is.

I've been programming for 15 years, and have personally used sage for 7 years. 10m loc is definitely within reason for the number of features the app has.

If he doesn't understand WHAT the software IS. Then how can he sit there and say what the level of difficulty is.

He DOES NOT KNOW. because HE DOES NOT KNOW what quickbooks is.

[0x0]

I parsed his "something's gone horribly wrong" as to mean "wrong with the accounting laws in this country", not "wrong with the software development".

[jacques_chester]

Law is complex because the world is complex. We're talking about "essential" complexity; it exists in the domain and it can't be wished away.

[Bill_Dimm]

I have to disagree. Law is complex largely because politicians need to feel like they are doing something. They make changes so they can claim in their next campaign that they've improved things. They make changes to benefit their likely donors/voters. The cruft keeps piling up and it rarely gets wiped away.

Consider tax-advantaged retirement savings. Why do we have: traditional IRA, Roth IRA, SEP IRA, SIMPLE IRA, 401k, Roth 401k, and 403b, all with different requirements and different benefits? The need to have a reasonable amount of savings when you retire is universal, so why this complicated mess? Why are two people doing the same job at two different companies able to save dramatically different amounts based on whether or not their employer chooses to offer a 401k? Why force every taxpayer to do a 10-line (or whatever it is) calculation to determine eligibility to for an IRA just so we can prohibit a few rich people from having a benefit (hint: it would be a lot easier for everyone to make it universally available and just bump the rich people's tax bracket by a hair if you really feel the need to wipe out the pittance in tax savings that they would obtain). This isn't necessary complexity, it is pointless stupidity that we all suffer for (except for the accountants that gain employment from it).

[jacques_chester]

Sure, that's one source of complexity in legislation.

But really, seriously, the world is complex. Every day people stumble on combinations of circumstances that have never occurred before in human history. Some fraction of those people get into an argument about what happens next. Some fraction of those go to a judge and ask her what the answer is.

The judge takes the existing principles, cogitates a bit, then extends the case law to cover the new scenario based on analogy with older scenarios.

This creates a new piece of law. It's never been seen before. But it might turn out to have profound consequences.

Before switching to computer science, I studied law. It's complicated because people are complicated.