Comment by vannevar

I don't think that Brooks was arguing that any given fixed programming task could not be made easier over time; clearly, even in 1986, there were programming tasks that had become trivial by use of existing code but were originally quite challenging to code on their own. I think Brooks was talking about the work of the individual programmer: given two identical programmers, with the same available libraries of existing code, is there a language or IDE that will make one 10x more productive than the other? And I think the answer is still, no.