[praptak]

Show me an example of a large complex software system built from spec rather than evolved.

[iafan]

Everything that is touching hardware, for example. Bluetooth stack, HDMI, you name it.

Everything W3C does. Go is evolving through specs first. Probably every other programming language these days.

People already do that for humankind-scale projects where there have to be multiple implementations that can talk to each other. Iteration is inevitable for anything that gains traction, but it still can be iteration on specs first rather than on code.

[ako]

I would expect them to build prototypes to iterate over the specs.