Here’s a Technology Review article about Charles Simonyi and the challenges in improving the productivity of programmers. Found via Dave Winer.
When it comes to programmer productivity, the article neglects one fact about software development: The amount of change a programmer can make to a design in one day exceeds that which they can make in other ways–so maybe that’s why it looks so hard. 🙂
Of course, for a class of apps, there’s no doubt in my mind that programmer productivity can’t be drastically improved. The evolution of software development will see to it.