Comment by 0xbadcafebee

The Mythical Man-Month came out in 1975. It was written after the development of OS/360, which was released in 1966. Of the many now-universally-acknowledged truths about software development contained in that book, No Silver Bullet encapsulates why "in 20 years" we will still not have a better idea:

  There is no single development, in either technology or management technique,
  which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement within a decade
  in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity."

I like to over-simplify that quote down to:

  Humans are too stupid to write software any better than they do now.

We have been writing software for 70 years and the real world outcomes have not gotten a lot better than when we started. There are improvements in how the software is developed, but the end result is still unpredictable. Without thorough quality control - which is often disdained, and there is no requirement to perform - the result is often indistinguishable whether it was created by geniuses or amateurs.

That's why I would much rather have "chafing guidelines" that control the morass, than to continue to wade through it and get deeper and deeper. If we can't make it "better", we can at least make it more predictable, and control for the many, many, many problems that we keep repeating over and over as if they're somehow new to us after 70 years.

"Guidelines" can't stop researchers from exploring new engineering materials and techniques. Just having standard measures, practices, and guidelines, does not stop the advancement of true science. But it does improve the real-world practice of engineering, and provides more reliable outcomes. This was the reason professional engineering was created, and why it is still used today.