> I feel as if a lot of multipliers have happened that he didn't anticipate

Such as? I think his essay still stands the time that no single multiplier is even close to an order of magnitude productivity boost, with the exception of already existing code.

LLMs are possibly the biggest change to how software is developed, but they are also nowhere near this magnitude - if any - in case of more complicated software.

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ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago | parent [-]

You’re probably right, when I think about it.

I know that OOP was just getting its feet under it, when he wrote that. It turned out to have a huge multiplying effect on productivity, but also introduced a whole new universe of footguns.

Maybe if OOP had been introduced, along with some of the disciplines that evolved, it might have been a big multiplier, but that took time.

I guess, upon reflection, each of our big “productivity boosts” were really evolutionary movements, that took time to evolve.

He really was quite prescient.

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taffer 2 days ago | parent [-]

> It turned out to have a huge multiplying effect on productivity

In retrospect, I am highly sceptical that OOP has had any positive impact on productivity. Its popularity coincided with the advent of automatic memory management, the World Wide Web and relational databases, and later with dependency management tools such as Maven. It is much more likely that it is these factors that have improved productivity, rather than OOP.

	▲	ChrisMarshallNY 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		No, it helped. What OOP gave us, was the ability to intelligently abstract complexity. I’ve been coding since we used flint knives, and can tell you, from personal experience, that it did. However, when it was introduced, it was done so, with some of the most outrageous claptrap I’ve ever heard. It came out of the starting gate, hobbled. Those of us grizzled vets, with hype-scars, ignored that shit, and did pretty well.