Why Your Development is Crazy.
Kathleen makes some great points about how Development is really, really hard.
Why Your Development is Crazy - Leaning Into Windows
I STILL see that many clients think a single hacker in a weekend can crank out the software equivalent of "War & Peace". I find this incredibly frustrating when talking about my hourly rate and that it is going to take about 10x more hours to do the work than they seem to think it will. Granted this is not always the case, but it still pervades the small business world.
Tools are getting better, but at the same time, the demands for what the code should do keeps getting more complex.
... the sheer number of alternatives we have to do things today is staggering. Can a Lone Developer survive in today's world? Yes, but its certainly not easy.
[via SteelePrice.Net]
I think its the learning curve - back in the day a flip through K&R and a DOS Programmers Manual and off you went. Not only are there too many choices now, the API surfaces are so obscenely huge that no-one can possibly know them all. You don't make an informed decision anymore - you look along a path until you see a solution that will do and you have to be satisfied with that. There is not the time to pursue all paths, or worse, even a meaningful range of possible paths and the consequence is, you remain a little scared that there may be a much better solution round the next bend.
Its the hope you can't stand. That what you have just spent an age getting to grips with won't be made obsolete and dumb by the next pre-pre-pre announcement prior to CTP availability that comes before the beta of the anticipated release of something that will actually turn out quite different in three years time.