> The question of avoiding that accidental complexity at the first try is a separate question.
But is that not the more important question? -- how much effort it takes to design software (which surely is the gist of Brooks' observation).
If the final code is much smaller, yet it took as long to design/write, what has been gained? Something, certainly (easier to manipulate, reuse), and furthermore there must be a fairly good relation between size and effort, yet it is the effort to create that is the key matter here.
Is the effort to create, really the key matter? Typically most of the cost is incurred in other activities, such as maintenance of software after the initial release.
Not always, but there is software that you write once, and then forget. For some shops (proprietary and custom software, mostly), the cost of the first try is what counts most. Nevertheless, I addressed that effort to create: geniuses write languages, and the rest of us use them. And with sufficiently good compilation languages, I bet we wouldn't need a genius to implement a worthwhile language.
But is that not the more important question? -- how much effort it takes to design software (which surely is the gist of Brooks' observation).
If the final code is much smaller, yet it took as long to design/write, what has been gained? Something, certainly (easier to manipulate, reuse), and furthermore there must be a fairly good relation between size and effort, yet it is the effort to create that is the key matter here.