Silver Bullets Aplenty

Context: We all know that there's no silver bullet that will slay the metaphorical werewolf embodying the fact that Making Software Is Difficult; we're also familiar with the difference between essential complexity and accidental complexity.

Assertion: what looks to us like essential complexity is, in reality, a symptom of inadequate domain understanding; just like "artificial intelligence", the phrase "essential complexity" fundamentally signifies "stuff we can't automate yet".

Support: For eample, consider Ruby on Rails, about which I know almost nothing except that it makes for good blog-fodder. As I understand it, it makes the development of a good-sized class of applications relatively trivial: it lets you focus on what's unique to your app, and magically takes care of everything else. To be instructively tautological: it removes most of the complexity inherent in implementing the sort of app that can be easily developed with Rails.

Further: Every time you hand a task off to code that someone else has written, you've carved off a small part of (what might, 10 years ago, have been thought to be) the essential complexity of the task you're coding, and negated the burden of worrying about it.

You don't have to personally understand everything that happens behind the scenes, because someone else has done the hard work of understanding the domain and providing you with effective abstractions. (Assume good-enough abstractions that don't leak in "normal use".)

Further further: Every time you hand a task off to code that *you* already wrote, you're doing the same thing. And as you figure out the right abstractions for your domain, whatever it is, the ugly details (hopefully) migrate away from the high-level get-stuff-done API; eventually, you can allow yourself the luxury of forgetting how the sausages are made[1], and just use your library without worrying about the details.

The common thread should be clear: to return to the original metaphor, software development is in fact the process of building (or borrowing) wooden stakes, silver bullets, phase plasma rifles or rapid-fire bee cannons, as appropriate, and employing them to ruthlessly clear the field of distracting accidental complexity.

My point is that there *are* silver bullets: we use them all the time, they work well, and we're always coming up with still more effective variants. The future's shiny, and smells of cordite.

[1] They're made out of a whole bunch of metaphors, mixed together quite hideously. Eww.