Steve:
> Software Engineering has long been an oxymoron.
Like country music!?
> I suspect it was a term
> made to glorify the practice of hacking,but give it better sound bytes
> and a justification for higher salaries. The "Software Problem" was
> highly publicized in the 1980's and 1990's, and Object-Oriented
> Programming was touted to be the solution, but has grossly failed to
> deliver.
You can go back even further -- the term was invented (as far as I know) for
a NATO conference in 1968 -- a bit before my working life started -- but they
had all the same problems we do and much the same snake oil. Just one quote
from the conference:
"In aiming at too many objectives the higher-level languages have, perhaps,
proved to be useless to the layman, too complex for the novice and too
restricted for the expert. I maintain that high-level programming languages
have, to this extent, failed." (d’Agapeyeff)
> In fact, I would be as bold to say that the "Software Problem" has
> gotten worse, and Software is now even more fragile.
Yes indeed. Environments are far too complicated and change too fast. If it
wasn't for the fact that Microsoft have brainwashed an entire generation into
lowered expectations ("the new version of MS-xxx only falls over five times a
day when running on an otherwise empty machine") most developers would have a
tarnished reputation.
The traditional approach to solving the software engineering problem has been
to create new languages. It's not worked to date but -- hey I wouldn't be a
developer if I wasn't hopelessly optimistic -- maybe Rebol will be the One.
Sunanda.
--
To unsubscribe from this list, please send an email to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" in the
subject, without the quotes.
