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Hello,
I've recently been (re)reading many of the classic papers in software
engineering, in particular those in 'Software Fundamentals', the collected
papers of D.L. Parnas, the book 'Software Pioneers', and most recently
C.A.R. Hoare's Turing Award address 'The Emperor's Old Clothes'. It is
extraordinary to see how the ideas they proposed in the 1960s and 1970s are
embodied in the Wirth family of languages, and almost nowhere else. It must
be very frustrating for the pioneers to see the same mistakes happening over
and over again, despite the availability of good solutions. The conclusion
must be that programmers like debugging.
Hoare referred specifically to this business of range-checking and whether
or not it should be an optional part of a language (he was talking about his
first implementation of Algol). He concluded that in any other engineering
profession it would have long ago been made illegal *not* to include such
fundamental safety features.
My own sad experience of >20 years of commercial software development has
been that there is more credit in fixing highly visible broken software than
in writing software that doesn't break, and quickly becomes an invisible
part of the users' environment.
Regards,
Bob
----Original Message Follows----
From: Wojtek Skulski <skulski{([at]})nowhere.xy
[...]
I dedicate my story to all those who have given up hope
that solid software engineering has ever existed. It did,
and it still does. BlackBox never leaks a single byte
of memory, and I cannot recall the last time it crashed.
However, in order to find such a great tool like BlackBox
one has to open up the mind and start looking beyond
where everyone else is looking. And this may be the biggest
obstacle.
_________________________________________________________________
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Received on Fri Feb 14 2003 - 12:37:32 UTC