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Comment by pjmorris | Hacker News Reader

This might be just me, but Brooks explicitly put a decade time tag on his 1986 prediction, complicating the authors's comparisons from ~three decades later. I guess the way to tell would be to have people or teams build examples of 1986 level-of-complexity software and see how long it takes them.

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That's fine for Brooks, but the OP is entirely correct that people still routinely cite the "no silver bullet" doctrine 3 decades later. So it's still worth revisiting even if it's technically 2 decades past its expiration date.

Brooks revisits NSB 20 years after the fact and makes pretty strong arguments that specific intervening technologies have not disproved his original conclusions. I think we could do the same today.

The author of this post conflates better with a 10x improvement from a few anecdotal experiences that are themselves extremely accidental to the act of creating software. He may have a point about the large volume of accidental improvement areas remaining but I think this is because like the JS ecosystem they are growing faster than we solve them.

I think the reality is likely the author is themselves a 10x improvement over their decade-past self.

> Brooks revisits NSB 20 years after the fact

Do you have a link to this? I'd like to read it.

Closest thing I could find was a report [0] on a 2007 panel discussion with Brooks at OOPSLA, titled “No Silver Bullet” Reloaded – A Retrospective on “Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering"

Here's [1] a link to his 1995 update, an excerpt from an anniversary edition of 'The Mythical Man Month'

[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1297846.1297973

[1] http://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks-NoSilverBullet.pdf

I can't find a PDF, but it's a chapter in a newer edition of "The Mythical Man Month" called "no silver bullet refired"

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