3 ms·
Mass produced software components (1968)
- lallysingh 18y agoActually a nice example of a larger problem: people, even today, think of software production the way they do of any physical product. Writing the same system more than once (e.g. a consulting firm for companies' internal applications) will get economy of scale, yes, but that's missing the real point. If you're writing the same app twice, you've already screwed up. I want to say that it has to do with language selection, that the mainstream languages are set up for local syntactic sugar instead of large-scale abstraction. But then people ask what language I think they should use (I won't name names, but let's just say "something functional"), and they just say "Fuck You Lally."
- gruseom 18y agoGreat artifact. I think this is from the famous conference where the term "software crisis" gained currency. (The term, in the 1970s, came to stand for the unanswered question of Why Is Software So Hard? And specifically, why so much harder than hardware.) One thing I was surprised to see (in the discussion at the end of this piece) is that Peter Naur was among those falling for the idea of mass-produced components and the industrialization of software. He seems to have changed his mind quite dramatically later.