Great article. As another 40 year programmer I strongly agree with the “software is young” sentiment. Coding is fun but the way we tend to go about it is insanely boneheaded! I was in the Computer History museum in Santa Clara the other day (awesome place) which maybe provided some perspective. We haven’t really come all that far from the punch cards era, we’ve certainly added a lot of talent and people, but the punch cards are still essentially unchanged. Consider:
- the interface for telling a computer what to do is still a “text editor”, barely changed since 1980. Basically, a bigger punchcard. We’re still arguing about whether 120 columns is better than 80. Scratch’s blocks are a hint of fresh air but only the kids use this
- code execution is still totally decoupled from code creation. We use insanely rich compilers to “talk” to our machines, but pretty much nothing to “listen” to them. We “log” things then ignore the logs. There’s no way to tell how often a line of code has been run, or what the universe of values has been for a given variable, short of digging into an awkward field called “tracing”. Borland Turbo Pascal offered live code tracing 40 years ago (Ctrl-N to execute to the next line) but nobody has meaningfully improved upon it.
I don’t mean to gripe — we’ve accomplished so much with these and the other simple metaphors —- but they do reinforce the idea that the software field is still very young.
- the interface for telling a computer what to do is still a “text editor”, barely changed since 1980. Basically, a bigger punchcard. We’re still arguing about whether 120 columns is better than 80. Scratch’s blocks are a hint of fresh air but only the kids use this
- code execution is still totally decoupled from code creation. We use insanely rich compilers to “talk” to our machines, but pretty much nothing to “listen” to them. We “log” things then ignore the logs. There’s no way to tell how often a line of code has been run, or what the universe of values has been for a given variable, short of digging into an awkward field called “tracing”. Borland Turbo Pascal offered live code tracing 40 years ago (Ctrl-N to execute to the next line) but nobody has meaningfully improved upon it.
I don’t mean to gripe — we’ve accomplished so much with these and the other simple metaphors —- but they do reinforce the idea that the software field is still very young.