Software development becoming less mature?

The Endeavour 2014-08-06

Michael Fogus posted on Twitter this morning

Computing: the only industry that becomes less mature as more time passes.

The immaturity of computing is used to excuse every ignorance. There’s an enormous body of existing wisdom but we don’t care.

I don’t know whether computing is becoming less mature, though it may very well be on average, even if individual developers become more mature.

One reason is that computing is a growing profession, so people are entering the field faster than they are leaving. That lowers average maturity.

Another reason is chronological snobbery, alluded to in Fogus’s second tweet. Chronological snobbery is pervasive in contemporary culture, but especially in computing. Tremendous hardware advances give the illusion that software development has advanced more than it has. What could I possibly learn from someone who programmed back when computers were 100x slower? Maybe a lot.