Notes:
And what is even more shocking about these programs is that they do not give any hints as to what the problem is all about. You may have heard of steganography, the secret writing where the secret message is mixed into a very large amount of foreign data, such as a photograph, so that it is hidden like a needle can be hidden in a haystack. Programmers today are unwitting steganographers, they effectively hide the information about their problem by mixing it up with thousands of lines of implementation detail, and this self-defeating activity makes programming the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty.
I'd like to conclude the talk by mentioning briefly how my company Intentional Software Corporation is approaching this issue, and how it relates to what we learned from Rosetta code.
A key fact that tends to be overlooked - is that the purpose of software is to implement the intentions of its creators. It is overlooked perhaps because this is not yet actionable; meaning that there is nothing we can do to about it.