[chromatic]

Please excuse this small rant.

If you're referring to Fred Brooks, he wrote "[T]here is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity." (emphasis mine)

The surrounding context makes his comment a very specific prediction which means something different from what most people claim he meant. Much of the rest of his essay suggests techniques which address the issue of essential complexity and which, when applied together, he hoped would produce that order of magnitude productivity.

Perhaps there was no single such improvement in the years 1986 to 1996, but when people use the phrase "no silver bullet" to dismiss potential improvements in productivity, I believe they're doing Brooks and the rest of us a great disservice.

[RogerL]

I'm confused. I was pointing out that you cannot do something simple like count LOCs, run a CASE tool that spits out cyclomatic complexity, or other things, and instantly measure productivity. How is that not what Brooks was saying? You don't bean count your way to better software, you manage the inherent complexity. Daily, hard work, understanding all of the parts, and so on.

[jacques_chester]

You missed a key point of the essay, which is that no matter how much progress we make in accidental complexity, essential complexity does not go away.

[chromatic]

Of course that's the key point of the essay, but I've never observed that anyone who says "There's no silver bullet in productivity" has made it past the desire to misuse the title of a Fred Brooks essay to support a middlebrow dismissal to the nuance of distinguishing between accidental and essential complexity.

After all, much of programming culture is stuck on the idea that the clarity of syntax of a programming languages to novices is more important to maintainability of programs written in that language than domain knowledge, for example.