.

//NLP exercise: Replace ‘programming’ with ‘design’, ‘programmers’ with ‘designers’.

“Why is software so expensive?” An explanation to the hardware designer.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD648.html

“To educate a generation of programmers with a much lower threshold for their tolerance of complexity and to teach them how to search for the truly simple solution is the second major intellectual challenge in our field. This is technically hard, for you have to instill some of the manipulative ability and a lot of the good taste of the mathematician. It is psychologically hard in an environment that confuses between love of perfection and claim of perfection and, by blaming you for the first, accuses you of the latter.

How do we convince people that in programming simplicity and clarity —in short: what mathematicians call “elegance"— are not a dispensable luxury, but a crucial matter that decides between success and failure? I expect help from economic considerations. Contrary to the situation with hardware, where an increase in reliability has usually to be paid for by a higher price, in the case of software the unreliability is the greatest cost factor. It may sound paradoxical, but a reliable (and therefore simple) program is much cheaper to develop and use than a (complicated and therefore) unreliable one.”