Talk:History of software engineering
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[edit] Beyond Silver Bullet
24May06: This article was created in June 2004 by moving the History section from the article "Software Engineering" which contained the "No Silver Bullet" era. I believe the era should be more limited, since the expression is like saying, in business management, still "No Free Lunch" or, in world politics, an era of still "No World Peace" yet. I am contemplating "Goto Considered Harmful" for the 1970s, in emphasizing structured languages, and, for the 2000s, "Lightweight Methodologies" as the era titles. -Wikid77 21:32, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Minor Edits
24May06: This section is for detailed notes about some minor edits. Not all minor edits are intended to be explained here. -Wikid77 21:32, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] java
I am a little skeptical about the assertion that Java, at least in that namesake and incarnation, was touted as a 'silver bullet' in 1989.
[edit] Major Developments
What's the deal with the "Role Of Men"? Was there actually something informative there, and was later vandalized, or does men being cameramen for "Girls Gone Wild" video ACUTALLY represent a breakthrough in software engineering in some intricate way?
[edit] Distracting clause
The text I've italicized in the following sentence (under "Information Superhighway") just seems out of place to me: "The rise of the Internet, based on pre-planned government-sponsored technology, led to...". It is somewhat off-topic and doesn't flow with the rest of the paragraph. I suspect it was put in there to emphasize the government's role in the creation of the Internet. This is not the article for that, so I'm removing it (see the old article in the history to see what I mean by it seeming out of place). Mbarbier (talk) 14:25, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Worthwhile topic
The topic has some potential, but in its present form crosses the line on WP:OR. References would help greatly. Software engineering is an established academic concern, there would actually be a well-defined history in terms of the major ideas and seminal papers. The history is so much richer than eras and fads. MaxEnt 19:01, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Agreed, very important, but the article reads to me as extremely naive. A thoughtful history ought to trace the essential concepts and underlying economics that have lead to current day practice -- dogma should be discussed in more objective terms as group deliberation and belief set formulation (this is not a science). What should the conceptual progression include? Here's my take: abstraction of logic circuit design into assembly language, development of Fortran by John Bacus, Von Neumann's conception of the operating system, the story of Kernigan and Richie's Unix and C, and the filtration of this into academic curricula. IBM's contribution to software engineering (software on the 360). The evolution of microcomputer software development. Grady Booch, Ada, and the defense industry's investment in methods for managing multi-developer projects. Xerox, Smalltalk, C++ and the object oriented "revolution". MIT and Lisp. Attempts to democratize software development with 4GL's and Visual Basic. The influence of prominent figures like Edsger Dijkstra, informational and reputational cascades, and group polarization.
Software development ought to be considered as an economic activity (most full time pratitioners are paid by private enterprise) that has only recently branched from state sponsored research (for defence applications and as a corner of applied math research). BrainRepair (talk) 11:53, 8 December 2007 (UTC)
