> ”Most of us,” she said, “are just making something slightly better than what already exists.”

It occurred to me yesterday that Flyer (1903) to Viking (1976) was only ~7 decades, and we're currently at Eniac (1945) + 78.

That said, I think the aerospace people had a far, far better grasp of the underlying principles of their domains than we do of ours, so there's still hope for major advances in software.

(OTOH, judging by his published output, Luca Cardelli believes he had Von Neumann programming all figured out by the turn of the century — so that hope may be slim)