>This industry has had a large cadre of brilliant people working in it for a long time. Why does it seem that development is getting more complex rather than easier?


Al, I think there are a lot of reasons. One of them I think is this - software has become more and more about the user experience. This adds so much overhead to the design and complexity of development of even basic applications.

Remember when we were writing apps in DOS - we only dealt with one screen, one window if you will. And only our app was running. The interface was plain text. Now we need multiple windows, multi-threading, multiple apps running, mouse control, hot regions, mouse overs, DDE, OLE, etc. But so much of this stuff is not actually solving the problems but are about making the app marketable and exciting for the end-user.

I wonder though how many of these features the average user needs or even knows about. How many users buy Excel but use less than 5% of the functionality? Even among this community how many developers know and use all that VFP can offer? I know that I dont.

And software is still far too complex. Just yesterday a friend asked me to solve some virus issues they had. They use a tiny fraction of MS Office, a tiny fraction of the Windows OS, and a tiny fraction of their Quicken accounts. I suggest that they are typical home users.

And I also think that all that cool eye candy becomes real boring real fast. Once you have seen the XP mouse over on the buttons a hundred times you have seen it. Boring. So now we need a new OS which needs more memory and more HDD and more CPU so that the buttons can sing and dance too. Hmmm. Good for MS, good for Intel, nice for a few minutes, and then...?

:)