The last couple podcasts connecting with programmer productivity reminded me of this article trying to trace software's impact — or not — on overall productivity. It's main claim is that software, so far, has not had the expected impact on overall productivity, and that the challenge is that it is hard and expensive to model the real world within the constraints of programming. (Maybe you read it differently!) It seems to me that this is one big challenge with end-user programming, too: many people don't want to think beforehand about all the exceptions to a rule that happen in real life, since real life allows you to address those exceptions on-the-fly. https://web.archive.org/web/20221206161753/https://austinvernon.eth.link/blog/softwareisprocess.html

Oh geez. That's a good explanation for why we haven't see ever-increasing productivity despite all of the investment on in software. For individuals and small teams, computers aren't much better than analog tech like in-person discussions or pencil and paper. I feel that in a lot of things I use computers for. So often, I'd rather do it on paper than deal with the upkeep of the hardware and software to do it.