It is, exactly, the distinction between accidental and essential complexity that has not panned out.
Productivity is about getting solutions successfully deployed to production. Things that interfere with that may be "essential" or "accidental", but the distinction turns out not to matter much.
> Things that interfere with that may be "essential" or "accidental", but the distinction turns out not to matter much.
I obviously disagree. I think it matters a lot, especially because it allows us to detect that trap programmers and hackers often fall prey to: hyperfocusing on minor technical details because they are cool to think about without regards to the actual gains.
That's not to deny a lot of improvements in the past decades actually made programmers' quality of life tremendously better.
Dan Luu is a very interesting essayist and I find myself nodding in agreement with a lot of what he writes. He's made it his business to go against the grain of most "universally held truths" (a great chunk of his essays are about debunking commonly held beliefs about tech and science), but in doing so I think he tends to overstate his case. In this case, I think he is right but also overstating his case, and Brooks remains as relevant as ever. Luu's 2022 addendum is interesting, because it certainly cuts both ways -- not just in the way Luu would want!
Productivity is about getting solutions successfully deployed to production. Things that interfere with that may be "essential" or "accidental", but the distinction turns out not to matter much.
One of Dan Luu's better essays covered this.