 <p>On InfoQ there is a very interesting summary of the OOPSLA Panel from 2007 discussing this topic:</p> <p><a href="http://www.infoq.com/articles/No-Silver-Bullet-Summary" rel="nofollow noreferrer">No Silver Bullet Reloaded Retrospective OOPSLA Panel Summary</a></p> <p>There are a lot of gems in this discussion!</p> <p>Especially cool is Martin Fowler disguised as a Werewolve and playing advocatus diaboli.</p> <p>There is also a video from <a href="http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-1X3duvryA" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Fowler as Werewolve on YouTube</a></p> <p>The sarcastic comments from Fowler alone are worth the read of the summary!</p> <p>Reading the summary there seems to be a general consensus that there is really no silver bullet.</p> <p>But this is also a dangerous consensus. As Bertrand Meyer (also in the summary) poses it:</p> <blockquote> <p>according to his experience, many people, especially managers, rejected new ideas of the ‘80s and ‘90s like OOP, which actually were old ones, because they did not believe the new technology proposed to them would have a serious impact on development,</p> </blockquote> <p>Using the insight, that there is no silver bullet as an excuse to stop trying to improve is certainly not the way to go!</p> <p>I was a student of Bertrand Meyer at university, and he was a critic of Brooks paper, because he claimed that it was smothering innovation and the desire for improvement.</p>