Ever more complex software stacks

You are absolutely right about the increment in complexity of software development. And this is although current approaches try to abstract things away. It seems to me that coding is an activity that should be abolished in the opinion of many methologists.
To make things better a bit, I claim that MDD or even MDA is not present in most of the commercial software projects happening today (MDA unequal UML of course).

BTW, I also began programming Z80. It was about 1989 on a Schneider CPC 6182 (later on Amstrad CPC). It should be valid to conclude that with Z80-assembler it was a lot harder achieving a goal than it is nowadays with higher languages such as Java. And even former Pascal compared to Java loses any competition, IMO.

Klaus

PS: Maybe you fix the word “Maschine” in your picture ;-)

Starting with a VC20 and some computers later a CPC 464, I think the requirements and goals were easier/simplier back than, so the goals could be accomplished with Z80 machine code without libraries. But as the software stack grows, the expectations of customers grow too. So yes of course, with the current requirements and goals, you can’t use older stacks to achieve them. Just compare a J2EE replicated server with something handwritten in C .

PS: I saw it the moment I finished the post, but didn’t know how to overwrite the image in wordpress, so I thought what the hell, noone will notice ;-)