Wesner Moise quickly reviews Brook's "No Silver Bullets" assertion and claims "[t]hat assertion turns out to be pure nonsense, amply disproven by numerous advances in IDEs, languages, frameworks, componentization over the past few decades."

I couldn't disagree more. While the cumulative effects have given us more than an order of magnitude improvement, no single development has come close. I would say that the two single areas where there have been a close to an order-of-magnitude improvement are in user interfaces, with the rise of the compile-time visual form builders and HTML for text presentation, and network programming, with Java's stream-based model being a huge step over sockets.

Outside of network and graphics programming, I don't see the cumulative effects as being even two orders of magnitude. Bill Joy admits that he didn't write vi in a weekend -- that it tooks months. Let's say it took him 100 days. You think you could do it in 1?