If we had to categorize and our take a stab at percentages, how much of the problem of actually delivering software that isn’t crap a truly hard problem that we can’t hope to solve right now, and how much of it is a problem we’re simply not willing or properly motivated to solve?

I just came across JFK’s speech in 1962 about the moon program: http://www1.jsc.nasa.gov/er/seh/ricetalk.htm.

I won’t make the ridiculous claim that improving the security and quality of software is equivalent of going to the moon, but at least one quote is worth repeating…

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”