Yannis's Law: Programmer Productivity Doubles Every 6 Years


I keep hearing aphorisms about the "software crisis" and the lack of progress in software development. I have been programming for over 15 years, and I find such claims to be completely false: I am convinced that I could reproduce with today's tools the work of a competent programmer of 15 years ago in a small fraction of the time.

By analogy to Moore's law and (more appropriately, because of its intention to provoke, rather than predict) Proebsting's law, I propose that programmer productivity doubles every 6 years.

To support the quantitative part of my claim consider the following observation. In his classic paper "On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules" (1972), David Parnas writes:
The KWIC index system accepts an ordered set of lines, each line is an ordered set of words, and each word is an ordered set of characters. Any line may be "circularly shifted" by repeatedly removing the first word and appending it at the end of the line. The KWIC index system outputs a listing of all circular shifts of all lines in alphabetical order. This is a small system. Except under extreme circumstances (huge data base, no supporting software), such a system could be produced by a good programmer within a week or two.
The year is 2003 and I would not consider a programmer to be good (this includes familiarity with tools) if they cannot produce the KWIC system within an hour or two, instead of a week or two in 1972. This constitutes an increase in productivity by a factor of 40 over the course of 31 years, or over 12.5% per year, which results in a doubling of productivity every 6 years.

Note that none of the tools used by the modern "good programmer" is particularly suited to the specifics of the KWIC system: the problem has to be solved "from scratch", so to speak, although the starting point is different now than it was in 1972.

This impressive progress is arguably the cumulative result of reusable software entities, better system tools, better programming languages, better CS education, but also good use of faster machines that allow us to ignore low-level overheads and favor slightly less efficient but convenient solutions.