Phil Factor (12/15/2008)
This is always going to be subjective, but there certainly seems to be a perception that applications just don't seem to be developed any faster for all the 'Rapid Application Development' going on. Jonathan Sachs developed the whole of Lotus 123 V1 in assembler code in just six months in 1982, and the whole project took only a year.
I've often felt that application development was faster when the tools were simpler.
In addition, there was much tighter control over the result. For example, a "hello world" can still be written using the DOS debug command...C:\> debug
-n helloworld.com
-a 100
1552:0100 mov dx,010b
1552:0103 mov ah,9
1552:0105 int 21
1552:0107 mov ah,4c
1552:0109 int 21
1552:010B db 'Hello, World!',0d,0a,'$'
1552:011B
-r cx
CX 0000
:1b
-w
Writing 0001B bytes
-q
The result is all of 27 bytes long.
For a Visual Basic 2005 console application...Module HelloWorld
Sub Main()
Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!")
End Sub
End Module
The compiled executable is 24.5 Mbyte!
Derek