Martin Rinard's talk Living in the Comfort Zone held some interesting insights for me. Martin presented Maslow's hierarchy of needs and drew analogies between it, human development over the aeons, the encroachment of complexity in software.

One comment he made that was provocative was that we ought to quit bemoaning the lost simple state of software, and embrace the complexity. I don't think he meant we should all go out and bolt STL templates on to our favorite simple language. But that large systems are complex. That there is no type safety. There is no formal proof of these systems. Rather than try to close this gap, we ought to find alternative out-of-the-box ways to deal with software faults. This was complimentary to his talk I heard him give on Monday at the Internation Symposium on Memory Management. More on that talk later...