I graduated just after the Structured Programming War was won. I was probably the first generation to be taught to program by someone who actually knew how; to be warned of the real and present danger of the GOTO statement and to be exposed first to a language that didn’t need it. I didn’t need to fall back to assembler when the going got tough or to be able to read hex dumps or deal with physical memory constraints. I entered the computing profession just as people were starting to re-brand their programmers as ‘software engineers’ and academics were talking of ‘formal methods’ then ‘iterative development’ and ‘prototyping’ as we lost faith and retreated, as the techniques borrowed from other engineering disciplines continued to disappoint when applied to software.
After some years away from software development, I returned to find ‘Agile’, ‘Lean’ and ‘Software Craftsmanship’. We’d surrendered to the chaos, accepted that we weren’t designers of great engineering works but software whittlers. I was pleased that we’d dropped the pretence that we knew what we were doing but disappointed that we’d been reduced to hand-weaving our systems like hipsters.
There had been another good change too: The Object Model. The thrust of software engineering had often been decomposition but our model had been the parts breakdown structure, the skeletal parts of a dead system. Objects allowed us to model running systems, the process network at the heart of computation. I’ve recently seen a claim that the Unix command line interface with its pipes and redirection was the first object system. Unix begat GNU and Free software and Linux and close to zero costs for the ‘means of production’ of software. I don’t believe that Agile or Lean start-ups could have happened in a world without objects, the Internet or Free software. Do you know how much work it takes to order software on a tape from the US by post? I do.
So here we are, in our loft rooms, on a hand crafted loom made of driftwood and sweat, iterating towards a vague idea emerging out of someone’s misty musings and watching our salary eroded towards the cost of production. Is this why I studied Computer Science for 3 years? Who turned my profession into a hobby activity?
On The Outside 