TITLE: Yannis's Law on Programmer Productivity
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 13, 2007  1:55 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I'm communications chair for
<A HREF="http://www.oopsla.org/oopsla2007/">
  OOPSLA 2007</A>
and was this morning updating the CFP for the research papers
track, adding URLs to each member of the program committee.
Chair David Bacon has assembled quite a diverse committee,
in terms of affiliation, continent, gender, and research
background.  While verifying the URLs by hand, I visited
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~yannis/">
   Yannis Smaragdakis</A>'s
home page and ran across his self-proclaimed
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/~yannis/law.html">
   Yannis's Law</A>.
This law complements Moore's Law in the world of software:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Programmer productivity doubles every 6 years.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I have long been skeptical of claims that there is a "software
crisis", that as hardware advances give us incredibly more
computing power our ability to create software grows slowly,
or even stagnates.  When I look at the tools that programmers
have today, and at what students graduate college knowing, I
can't take seriously the notion that programmers today are
less productive than those who worked twenty or more years ago.

We have made steady advances in the tools available to mainstream
programmers over the last thirty years, from frameworks and
libraries, to patterns, to integrated environments such as
.NET and Eclipse, down to the languages we use, like Perl,
Ruby, and Python.  All help us to produce more and better code
in less time than we could manage even back when I graduated
college in the mid-1980s.

Certainly, we produced far fewer CS graduates and and employed
far fewer programmers thirty years ago, and so we should not be
surprised that that cohort was -- on average -- perhaps stronger
than the group we produce today.  But we have widened the channel
of students who study CS in recent decades, and these kids do
all right in industry.  When you take this democratization of
the pool of programmers into account, I think we have done all
right in terms of increasing productivity of programmers.

I agree with Smaragdakis's claim that a decent programmer working
with standard tools of the day should be able to produce Parnas's
KWIC index system in a couple of hours.  I suspect that a decent
undergrad could do so as well.

Building large software systems is clearly a difficult task, one
usually dominated by human issues and communication issues.  But
we do our industry a disservice when we fail to see how far we
have come.
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