All this discussion -- and no reference to Fred Brooks?!
A classic opinion piece on why building software will always be hard is Fred Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering” — there’s a version of this available at:
And if you don’t agree, one of its rebuttals, “What if there’s a Silver Bullet … and the Competition Gets it First?”, by Brad Cox — with a version available at:
A classic opinion piece on why building software will always be hard is Fred Brooks’ “No Silver Bullet – Essence and Accident in Software Engineering” — there’s a version of this available at:
http://people.eecs.ku.edu/~saiedian/Teaching/Sp08/816/Papers...
And if you don’t agree, one of its rebuttals, “What if there’s a Silver Bullet … and the Competition Gets it First?”, by Brad Cox — with a version available at:
http://www.virtualschool.edu/cox/pub/92ByteWhatIfSilverBulle...
…even gets into the idea of an “industrial revolution” for software.
Good classic reading… 8-)