Every programmer worth his/her salt knows of Brook's Law, from his book The Mythical Man-Month,
and by and large, we tend to agree with it. But this post points out that there may be new tools and methods in software development that may show a way past Brook's Law.
The main factors in this are the open source movement, the leverage of the better languages, and the better understanding of the effects of software interactions.
Open source allows developers to know more about the code by examination than was previously typical. Even in the proprietary world, internal developers expect access to the code they work with.
Better languages are simply an order of magnitude (or more) better than the older languages - we can know access a web page in a single line of code; we have built-in data structures that we can use without having to build linked lists, hash tables, etc. We are able to encapsulate more behavior in less code.
The better understanding of software interactions has allowed us to make better software - we know to separate concerns; we know to build software in layers; we know to make data-driven modules that can handle generic cases or special cases with impunity.
That said, we haven't eliminated the problem, we've just made it small enough to be lost in the noise given the complexity of software we currently develop.
And not all of us work in places and on systems where we get to take advantage of all these new toys. Many of us are still working with lower-level languages, on systems that are too big to get the comprehension of, with unreasonable deadlines.
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