If code is the blueprint, then the building would be the running machine state — which doesn’t seem right at all. No one cares about machine state, people only care about results: documents processed, picture displayed, airplane flown. Some of that implies some specific machine state somewhere, but that’s incidental.

If precise specifications required code, then you wouldn’t have regexes, SQL, or any of the other common (and uncommon) DSLs that flit about. Modeling the domain in question is the challenge, which really, really better be possible without *programming*, at least as we understand it — otherwise, the biggest bottleneck in progress will be the availability of programmers, rather than the availability and sophistication of domain experts.

Yeah, I’m no stranger to complexity, but I think we make things a lot more complicated than they need to be. I wonder if that has something to do with how small our ambitions are these days — it might be easier than we think to jump 100 steps ahead in some number of years than ensuring that we reliably take a delicate half-step each year or each quarter. I look back at what people like Englebart and Wozniak did, and the stuff that we (and even very, very large research groups) do is decidedly incremental — some might say pedestrian — in comparison.

With regard to “blueprint:building :: X:code”, I think code is the blueprint. If not code, then a specification that’s precise enough that it may as well be code. I don’t think programmers are going anywhere any time soon.

Cooking and even designing a building are very hard to do well, but still largely straightforward. Take tasty things, make a tastier thing. Take solid materials with known properties, make a bigger solid thing we can live in. Programming is not straightforward. “Take this thing that flips ones and zeros, and make it fly a plane.” Or play a video. Or run the internet. For any problem more difficult than “Collect me some data”, the complexity quickly explodes out of control. As I’m sure you’re aware.

I’ve found it natural to compare cooking to programming as well. http://bit.ly/5A7Ckg My “Great Chef” parable can either be taken as pointing out that “normal” people cannot appreciate software and the skill it takes to produce it, or as programmers getting too snooty and forgetting that ultimately software is supposed to be about the people using it.

Paul