It's almost absurd that after decades of debuggers, IDEs, and "Computer Science" writing software is still hard. Really hard. And what's even odder is that management still doesn't get it.
The fact that we were undertaking this thing that many people had done before us, we weren't the first, and that it could be so out of control, so unpredictable -- that threw me. I thought, OK, I don't know anything about this, I'm a writer and a journalist. I'm ignorant, but let me go educate myself. And so I did, and the first book I read was "The Mythical Man Month" [Frederick Brooks' classic study of the difficulties inherent in large software projects]. And I quickly realized that our experience was not unique at all. In a way it was the norm.
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/02/03/leonard/?source=rss
