Programmers (still) at work
Monday, March 22nd, 2004Scott Rosenberg covers Susan Lammers’ reunion of programming pioneers. A contentious group, they all did agree on one thing, that software is in a terrible state, both for users and for creators.
Charles Simonyi says “software as we know it is the bottleneck on the digital horn of plenty,” and advocates separating the subject expert and sw engineer roles, giving new tools to the former, and thus freeing them from the constraints (not least cultural) of the latter. At the site of his new company, it looks like he wants to shorten the information supply chain:
Using Intentional Software, the actual software source code looks like the design. So the design information is captured, not lost, and all the stakeholders — programmers and others — can have their design intent clearly represented in the code. This increases the quality and value of the software, by making it easier to develop, maintain and change.
Intentional Software Corporation will develop tools and technology based on a synthesis of recent innovations including aspect-oriented programming (AOP), generative (or transformational) programming (GP), intentional programming (IP), model-integrated computing (MIC) and others.
Jaron Lanier thinks that better programming is the most important challenge: the software world is far too brittle, we are always at the brink of catastrophe. “The path forward is being biomimetic.”
Andy Hertzfeld refutes the communal take on open source: “There’s an essential pragmatism to the notion that programmers work best when they can share, and learn from, one another’s work. After all, every other field of human endeavor works that way.” And Dan Bricklin read from Lammers’ original book, quoting Bill Gates: “The best way to prepare [for a career in programming] is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems.” More imperatively: “Getting the software industry on a more open, fair and level playing field,” as Hertzfeld put it, is a prerequisite for any leap forward in the programming world.