| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015927)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015927" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2736 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| Software |
| 237 |
| Microsoft and Philip Kahn of Borland, along with intuitive applications |
| such as the spreadsheet invented by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston and |
| made popular by Lotus Corporation. Today all computers have elegant |
| WYSIWYG, "What You See Is What You Get' interfaces, where you drag |
| and drop elements into place on the screen. Over the last 25 years writing |
| software has sped up and stopped being tedious - becoming almost a joy! |
| In No Silver Bullet, Brooks explains that writing software can't be |
| accelerated any further because all the tedious mechanical tasks have |
| already been removed. Remember his analogy: Writing software is like |
| building a house, but with some important differences. With a house, |
| an architect handles the design and then turns over construction to |
| a building company. Construction takes an appreciable time, more |
| time than the design and quite a bit more effort. But in software the |
| construction is totally automated. When we complete the design for a |
| piece of software we press compile on the computer and the software |
| is built and tested automatically in a matter of seconds. Speeding this |
| process up any further would make only a tiny improvement in the |
| overall software creation time, since the process is already 99% design |
| and 1% building. For the most part, the creative process of writing |
| software cannot be improved through mechanical means. |
| This is not always the case. I recently upgraded the machines for |
| some developers I work with. We added solid state hard drives. Compiling |
| a program now takes only 10 seconds, compared with 6 minutes before. |
| Because programmers nowadays tend to compile their programs very |
| regularly we estimate this saves them as much as an hour a day. This is |
| the only real innovation I have seen in the build phase of software in the |
| last 5 years, and it's arguably not an innovation at all. We just forgot to |
| keep on top of the build time and allowed it to get out of hand. |
| You might argue some counter examples. Modern software design |
| suites let you drag and drop things on the screen to make applications |
| or build a website. Two hundred million people have managed to put |
| together WordPress websites using this technique. These are mechanical |
| procedures for solving a programming task and seem to contradict my |
| argument. They allow us to lay out graphics, press a button and turn the |
| design into software. But they perform very simple tasks. The computer |
| simply notes the coordinates of each box on the screen and places those |
| numbers into a file. The process is entirely mechanical and could be |
| performed by a clerk with no programming knowledge following a set |
| of rules. The computer just does it faster. I did the clever work; I had the |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_015927 |
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|
