Nothing new in the programming realm
Recently I found an Interview with Victoria Livschitz where she talks about the current state and future development of (modern) programming languages.
"Here's what's really sad -- the overwhelming majority of so-called successful development projects produce mediocre software."
What she says (better, what I interpret) is, that a programming language should make it much harder for the developer to create (design) mistakes and give him more time to "create" software instead of "debug" it.
She also says, that there currently is no language, which gives such strengths into the hands of developers. One of the last non-trivial changes in programming structures was the introduction of Java, but it (almost) only prevents the programmer from producing memory-leaks and introduces few other concepts.
What's missing is something which somehow syntactically makes it harder to create semantically buggy software. Or that a working software evolves (and almost any software grows over its initial purpose) into a buggy state.
"Well, I see two principal weapons. One is the intuitiveness of the programming experience from the developer's point of view. Another is the ability to decompose the whole into smaller units and aggregate individual units into a whole. ... A forest is a complex ecosystem, but for the average hiker the woods do not appear complex."
So the development environment should aid the developer to put together the bricks and create a building instead of forming every brick over and over again.
Reusage of components is probably one of the keys of future development, but it is not enforced enough yet.
Shifting a bit off-topic:
(Third answer, second paragraph)
'"... Take almost any corporate accounting application, and you'll find it poor in quality, unimpressive in capabilities, difficult to extend, misaligned with other enterprise systems, technologically obsolete by the time of release, and functionally identical to dozens of other accounting systems. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on development, and millions afterwards on maintenance -- and for what? From an engineering standpoint, zero innovation and zero incremental value have been produced."
Well, this is something what large parts of the other development-teams of our company do. Creating accounting systems.
Should I be worried? Not for the immediate future, but what about mid-term, perhaps three to five years?
Luckily I'm not in a team, which has to do with accounting, I'm working in a relatively "hyping" area now. And I think, we have the potential to keep a place in the market if we don't make our mistakes from the past again.