On the plane today I was reading the april issue of Communications of the ACM, and ran across an article by Rosario Vidal and Elena Mulet entitled "Thinking about Computer Systems to Support Design Synthesis", which I found quite interesting. The article is basically about having computers be more useful and less cumbersome during the initial stages of design (in particular for CAD applications), but it just seemed to me like the basic premise applied to the creative aspects of software development, as well (at least for that interesting 2% Rocky talks about, I guess).

One small part that caught my interest was: "The first condition computer software for design must meet is not being an obstacle to creativity. A good atmosphere for creative processes does not ensure creativity, but being creative does become far more difficult if the computer tools being used fail to promote a favorable environment because they are too complex, too rigid, or too slow". This seems to apply to development tools in general as well as CAD systems, don't you think? I'd think this applies to some of the issues that have being voiced about Visual Studio 2005 lately.