The Economist Tackles Complexity in IT

yfnET writes "In recent weeks, The Economist has run a number of articles addressing the ever-increasing complexity of software systems. The magazine, with typical Economist wisdom, casts an eye towards past human endeavors for lessons on how today's IT industry can succeed in dealing with complexity. As part of last month's extensive survey of information technology (see Related Items sidebar), the magazine offers insight on the limits of real-world metaphors, the perils of managing a rat's nest of obsolescent systems, and the need for 'disappearing' technology. And hitting newsstands just today is an overview of development models for increasingly large and unwieldy software projects. Among other things, this article compares the open source model to Microsoft's efforts using a quasi-open license. It also describes the 'agile' programming movement and its potential to keep even the most gigantic of projects under control."

Comments

Re:Lisp, Smalltalk and complexity.

[MagikSlinger]

Hahahaha... Someone marked that as "Insightful" when they meant funny. (Take a large shot of whisky) I've worked with large Smalltalk and Lisp applications. *shudder*

The more languages I've used & the more complex systems I've worked on, the more I've come to love strong typing, modularity and interface guarantees.

The *concepts* in Smalltalk and Lisp are neat, but without typing, it just all becomes chaos especially when you start working with other people and in palimpset environments.

I think for Lisp, the idea of easy manipulated list structures are good, but blessing them with type information (like the ML family of languages does) makes them even more powerful.

Smalltalk's "everything's an object or method" has some powerful features. But when you read comments in the class browser like "takes a thing", but then find out during testing that it only takes certain kinds of things, it drives me maaad.

So the next person to say Lisp or Smalltalk are great for large, complex projects with multiple programmers will shot by me.