Everything can't be a postage-stamp-sized project. Everything can't be a chamber piece. Musicals aren't even meant to be that, or identified with it... It's none of it simple.
What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.
Programming today is the opposite of diamond mining. In diamond mining you dig up a lot of dirt to find a small bit of value. With programming you start with the value, the real intention, and bury it in a bunch of dirt.
But nothing is more opaque than absolute transparency.
The world is large, very large. My head is small, quite small. There is no way I can put the world in my head. Nevertheless, I have been trying to elaborate some kind of representation.
When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem.
If we give all of the people who filed incorrect tax returns the benefit of the doubt and assume that every single one of them simply made an honest mistake, then doesn't common sense tell us that maybe the tax code is just a little too complex?
I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.
In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the TEX project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.
It is at best insufficient and at worst inaccurate to settle on a definition of the Enlightenment, for the obvious reason that there was not just one.
