> In all of the conversations that I've seen lately about how technology affects us and how to rethink the world we want, I haven't seen much discussion of software's crushing cost. Who's working on interesting/out there stuff in the area of making serious software cheaper today?
I'm not aware of the author's lately conversations, but I would say that high-level languages and full-fledged frameworks are here to enable developers to make software more quickly and at a lower cost.
However, it's not strictly free. If a company can develop a Web app quickly thanks to the Django framework (for example) and Python, then it is because other people worked very hard to make Django and Python. But, the work only happened once, and it is now reusable by thousands of companies/developers.
Maybe that free software is a high factor towards "software's crushing cost".
So, what is interesting is that not only are they not free but the vastness of options create some fun compatibility issues which further escalates costs to bridge and work around issues.
My view is that we are in a dark ages of sort with how to write code, and we are still figuring out a great number of details.
I'm not aware of the author's lately conversations, but I would say that high-level languages and full-fledged frameworks are here to enable developers to make software more quickly and at a lower cost.
However, it's not strictly free. If a company can develop a Web app quickly thanks to the Django framework (for example) and Python, then it is because other people worked very hard to make Django and Python. But, the work only happened once, and it is now reusable by thousands of companies/developers.
Maybe that free software is a high factor towards "software's crushing cost".