Part 2 A thought experiment: If computing responds to commoditization and globalization as other manufacturing industries do, where does that leave programmers—and users?
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This piece is the second in a series titled: The future of software. You can read part 1 here.
The software industry is in a mess of its own making. To paraphrase Douglas Adams: Software is big. Really big. You just won't believe how huge, huge, mind-blowingly big it is.
As Adams also put it: To summarize, people are a problem. There are all kinds of solutions around communication, leadership, development methods and more, but most problems involve trying to coordinate large numbers of people and get them to work together. As a side effect, this has also led the industry to focus on certain types of programming languages and related tools, ones that present their own problems. But the problem is that we have billions, maybe trillions, of lines of code, and it's too big for anything but large groups of people to handle.
