The vision is that, well before the seventies have run to completion, we shall be able to design and implement the kind of systems that are now straining our programming ability, at the expense of only a few percent in man-years of what they cost us now, and that besides that, these systems will be virtually free of bugs.

— Edsger W. Dijkstra, The Humble Programmer

Well, unfortunately the bug-free vision didn't happen (far from it), but it's incredible to think about the kinds of progress we've made on breaking the "confines of intellectually manageable programs" that Dijkstra called programmers to focus on. I'm sure he would be astounded by the progress in the "design and implementation" of large-scale web applications, data mining, and high-performance computing in the last 10 years.