Fw: [B7L] the future of programming

Matthew read Alison's post about programming over my shoulder, and here's his thoughts:

[You may post this if you like]

That isn't the future of programming. That's what the vast majority of the industy is like today.

And of course, one reason why software is so unreliable is that the systems complexity is so large, even on a relatively trivial piece of software, that it is _literally_ impossible (computationally impossible) to ensure that it is error free. And then you get Visual Basic 'programmers' involved too :-)

Most large corporate software development is exactly this form of code archaeology (indeed, I spend much of my time picking over a 10-year-old corpse with increasingly complex trowels).

Now I'm off to watch 'Time Team'!

Matthew