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To: rushnomore who wrote (30757)	8/30/2000 3:09:56 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

Isn't it true that good programming science exists but is not being practiced in most cases? What do you think? Even though I am not the one to whom you addressed the question, how is "yes and no" for an answer? To be sure, the most dramatic component in the lack of quality and productivity in current software development is the gap between what is being done in most shops and the best of the state of the art. I referred in passing in an earlier post to a study done some ten years or so ago that found as large as 1000 to 1 ratios in productivity with the major contrasts in that study being the language, the tool environment, and the maturity of the programmer. If we brought this forward to the present day, I beleive we would find the top line gone up by a factor of 10 and the bottom line moved not a tittle. If we were to factor in talent in addition to maturity of the programmer there might be another factor of 10. But, at the same time, the discipline is very young. It is young in three ways, really. First, the whole business of writing software is relatively new, especially if you consider volume and the number of people doing it as a part of that time depth. Second, the class of problem we are attempting has changed enormously over the years so for most problem areas, the time depth is short indeed. But third, there is also a cultural youth which derives from the observed fact that software ideas disseminate very slowly. Unlike hardware, where a new idea is widely known within months and widely used within a couple of years, many software ideas disseminate with a half-life of 10 years or more. I.e., it isn't that people are aware of a bunch of right ideas about how to do software faster and better and are choosing to ignore them as much as it is that they are not effectively aware of the best of the art. So, give us another 20-30 years and not only will the best of the art advance substantially, but maybe we will even get somewhere in figuring out how to make less talented programmers more productive, raising the bottom bar. Today, I think the best of the art is more accomplished at making the talented programmer more productive, making that individual's output prodigious, but lessening the need for lesser developers.