Talk:History of software engineering

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)

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)

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.

Agreed - Looking at the wikipedia entry for Java it says James Gosling initiated the Java language project in June 1991 and that Sun released the first public implementation as Java 1.0 in 1995. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.47.49.51 (talk) 13:18, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

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?
 * The NASA reference claims that Hamilton coined the term "software engineering", and the 1945-1965 section offers other sources: The Bertrand Meyer blog entry does not mention NASA, but has NATO. –2A03:2267:0:0:84A0:90B:F037:D95B (talk) 19:54, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

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)

Prominence of the Internet
The period 1980 - 1990 was called a revolution in computing, fuelled by the PC, which became ubiquitous in offices and even homes. This lead to a steep increase in the sale of smaller COTS software packages. Yet the software industry was somehow able to meet the demand. The quality of PC software often had issues. Viruses were common.

During the nineties access to the Internet became widespread. The TCP/IP protocols became more complex, but this effort was mostly successful. That decade also saw the World-Wide Web, which mostly refers to the HTTP protocol and the HTML mark-up language. By the year 2000, the number of HTML pages exceeded the number of regular computer programs by far. Even though web pages were often written by amateurs and contained erroneous HTML code, that rarely led to computers crashing or people getting killed.

After 2000, the web saw the emergence of big complex sites created by professional teams. The web became interactive with complex software driving the software and increasing JavaScript inside the browsers. This represents a new breed of computer software that started to replace PC applications. More recently, so-called smartphones can also surf the web. After 2010, the security of Internet-connected computers was regarded as a serious problem.

I am not sure what this says about software engineering. Dan Oom (talk) 11:11, 13 November 2018 (UTC)

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)

Prominent people in the history of Software Engineering
I noticed the current prominent people in the history of Software Engineering are almost all developers of program languages. However I am under the impression that software engineering isn't about the development of program languages at all. It is about the development of new methodologies for the development and application of software systems. Development of program languages is an other subfield of computer science...!?

Even in the History of computing template Programming languages is an other chapter. So the solution seems simple here: just move that section to the History of programming languages article. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 18:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

This list of "Prominent people in the history of Software Engineering" named:
 * John Backus, inventor of Fortran.
 * Edgar F. Codd inventor of relational database. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.251.126.222 (talk) 08:58, 25 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Alan Cooper, developer of Visual Basic.
 * Edsger Dijkstra, developed the framework for proper programming.
 * James Gosling (developer of Oak, the precursor of Java)
 * Anders Hejlsberg, developer of Turbo Pascal.
 * Bill Joy, inventor of vi, early author of BSD Unix, and originator of SunOS, which became Solaris.
 * Alan Kay, pioneering work on object-oriented programming, and originator of Smalltalk.
 * Brian Kernighan, co-author of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie, coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages.
 * John Von Neumann, originator of the operating system concept.
 * Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C.
 * Bjarne Stroustrup, developer of C++.
 * Ken Thompson, inventor of Unix.
 * Niklaus Wirth inventor of Pascal and Modula.

An early history of software engineering by Robert L. Glass he named a number of other pioneers in the computing field: I think it is not amazing, that these two lists have no one in common. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 19:19, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Robert Babor, John Bennet, Bruce Blum, Barry Boehm, Robert Britcher, Peter J. Denning, Harold Highland, Raymond Houghton, Watts Humphrey, Frank Land, Ben Matley, David Myers, Donald Reifer and Norman Schneidewin.

People could maybe be listed in a new list are: -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 23:30, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Charles Bachman
 * Barry Boehm
 * Edsger Dijkstra, developed the framework for proper programming. (He was present in the 1968 NATO Conference on Software Engineering)
 * Robert L. Glass

Role of women
Is someone saying that there used to be more women, because it wasn't manly or something to write the recipes? If so, it should be easy to identify the people making this claim. I'd also like to see their evidence.

I look at the names of programmers when I watch movies, play video games, etc. It seems subjectively to be a very male-dominated field in the last 3 or more decades. But subjective impressions aren't good enough. At lease, quote a reliable source who makes the assertion that more men than women are active in the field.

Likewise, I'm wondering whether it's discrimination or something else, like personal inclination, that keeps women from making an equal contribution in this field. Is it safe to even ask the question? I remember what happened to that university president who suggested that factors should not be imputed but actually studied. --Uncle Ed (talk) 21:09, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

"Edsger Dijkstra (1930-2002) developed the framework for proper programming." What?
What does that mean? Does "proper programming" have a specific meaning in this context? Can someone provide a link to this "framework" so I can follow it? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.163.72.2 (talk) 18:56, 25 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Here: https://archive.org/details/Structured_Programming__Dahl_Dijkstra_Hoare 49.182.84.171 (talk) 04:45, 24 June 2022 (UTC)

Agreed, even wikipedia does not know what this is (it's not mentioned in Dijkstra's bio). Perhaps someone should remove this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.110.89.212 (talk) 00:01, 21 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Arguably his "GOTO considered harmful" was the first statement of what would be now considered as Software Engineering, and a vintage '79 SE course book quotes this. The intro of the Edsger W. Dijkstra page also confirms his role. –2A03:2267:0:0:84A0:90B:F037:D95B (talk) 20:10, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Split into History of Software article?
At present, there is no History of software article which seems a bit of an omission. Obviously some of the material in this article would belong in it, so I wonder whether anyone else thinks it would make sense to create a History of Software article. pgr94 (talk) 14:26, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I do, and I just did!--greenrd (talk) 14:17, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Timeline
The timeline is based on (only) one source, the "Jander" page of the saylor.org SE course. Their next page offers another timeline, it's a free (CC-BY-SA) article, maybe add it somewhere. –2A03:2267:0:0:84A0:90B:F037:D95B (talk) 20:16, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Important topic, confused article
The history of software engineering/programming is obviously a very important article, but when reading the content I recognize very little, instead the contents seem to deal with esoteric topics.

Maybe I'm looking for a wiki article on the technologies used over the past X decades of modern software development, rather than general techniques, but this article seems both important enough, and haywire enough to be rewritten. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.163.120.133 (talk) 12:12, 15 November 2021 (UTC)

Douglas T. Ross, MIT in the 1950s
The reference states:

D.T. Ross claims the term was used in courses he was teaching at MIT in the late '50s; "Interview: Douglas Ross Talks About Structured Analysis", Computer (July 1985), 80-88.

but this isn't true, the referenced interview talks about a series of lectures titled Software Engineering at MIT in 1968. Then the development of APT in the 50s and 60s .