No Silver Bullet - The Argument

The Argument

At the heart of the argument is the distinction between accidental complexity and essential complexity. Accidental complexity relates to problems that we create on our own and which can be fixed; for example, the details of writing and optimizing assembly code or the delays caused by batch processing. Essential complexity is caused by the problem to be solved, and nothing can remove it; if users want a program to do 30 different things, then those 30 things are essential and the program must do those 30 different things.

Brooks claims that we have cleaned up much of the accidental complexity, and today's programmers spend most of their time addressing essential complexity. One technology, that had made significant improvement in the area of accidental complexity was the invention of high level programming languages, such as Fortran at that time. Today's languages, such as C, C++, C# and Java, are considered to be improvements, but not of the same order of magnitude.

Brooks advocates "growing" software organically through incremental development. He suggests devising and implementing the main and subprograms right at the beginning, filling in the working sub-sections later. He believes that programming this way excites the engineers and provides a working system at every stage of development.

Brooks goes on to argue that there is a difference between "good" designers and "great" designers. He postulates that as programming is a creative process, some designers are inherently better than others. He suggests that there is as much as a tenfold difference between an ordinary designer and a great one. He then advocates treating star designers equally well as star managers, providing them not just with equal remuneration, but also all the perks of higher status: large office, staff, travel funds, etc.