Comment We keep 'improving' irrelevant things (Score 2, Interesting) 848
For the last 20 years the commercial software development
churned through imperative programming languages that do the same thing with just a bit different syntax and Spartan/or complete set of standard libraries (Cobol, fortran, C++, pascal, java, C++, C, perl, C#). So we have wasted investors money,
customers money, many man hours by lying to them that when we use the new programming languages things going to be much better (that self-satisfying process is now called 'commercial software industry').
In addition to manual conversion to different lang. syntax (and fixing some bugs on the way) of the existing software, we spent millions of dollars on what we call 'Design Tools' and those are mere lego-like packages that allow us to break-down our tasks into such small and disjoint components that a developer who was not part of the 'team-that-did-the-breakdown' would need to spend weeks to find out what set of 'components' (an important word in our vocabulary) enables that button (and it turns out that the a row in a database is read by the 'database layer', then the there is code that the checks if that row is has all the necessary data, then it sets some boolean flag (we call that a business logic layer), then the button checks that flag and to be enabled or disabled (and that we called our GUI layer)).
In the last 10-15 years, we came up with a role of a 'Software Architect' -- that probably had a noble goal, but really degenerated into a task of dowloading the latest 'new' technology from the internet, then setting them up for some irrelevant test, and then running around the company and telling everyone how we should 'upgrade to the latest technology for some great benefit and no one can understand'.
Then, in the past 20 years we convinced our customers that they cannot really expect bug-free software from us, but instead we can do something that does most of what they want and fix the rest later. So then the customers simply stopped believing us that we can manufacture something that works, the only thing that customers can do is to request us to do something by some date (therefore the unreasonable (but always movable :-) deadlines) -- and in fact, we got accustomed to it:
Look at the press releases of the public software companies: they do not mention what functionality their products have, how fault-tolerant they are... instead they mention what Tools they used to build their stuff (XML, EJB, Java, OO, UML, web-enabled and wireless ready). And for a while the stock market rewarded just that. But have you seen a profitable hardware design and manufacturing company bragging in their press releases what compiler or VLSI design tool they use, instead of highlighting the functionality of their product?
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We also convinced ourselves that there are no 'methods' to desing software without bugs, instead we'd rather rely on QA to test it -- because we think software is like nothing else -- it cannot be VERIFIED for CORRECTNESS by us.
And that is fundamentally what needs to be changed: we must be able to use mathematically sound algorithm verification techniques and we should ask our tool vendors NOT to deliver to us a syntax change every 3 years, but build for us tools that would do what do data-flow analysis on the program logic level, that would simulate timings and parallel execution for concurrency enabled applications (threading/etc) and so on.
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Of course there has been a lot of progress in the computer science and mathematics that supports it, but most of it did not make in to commercial app development world.
Compilers are better, language parsers are better, OSses are better -- but those are the tools where the science was used to design algorithms (like graph coloring for register allocations, or other optimization techniques)
And hardware, of course is much better --
the commercial software 'looks' like made leaps and bounds -- but it is really some of tools that we use underneath that made us look better.
churned through imperative programming languages that do the same thing with just a bit different syntax and Spartan/or complete set of standard libraries (Cobol, fortran, C++, pascal, java, C++, C, perl, C#). So we have wasted investors money,
customers money, many man hours by lying to them that when we use the new programming languages things going to be much better (that self-satisfying process is now called 'commercial software industry').
In addition to manual conversion to different lang. syntax (and fixing some bugs on the way) of the existing software, we spent millions of dollars on what we call 'Design Tools' and those are mere lego-like packages that allow us to break-down our tasks into such small and disjoint components that a developer who was not part of the 'team-that-did-the-breakdown' would need to spend weeks to find out what set of 'components' (an important word in our vocabulary) enables that button (and it turns out that the a row in a database is read by the 'database layer', then the there is code that the checks if that row is has all the necessary data, then it sets some boolean flag (we call that a business logic layer), then the button checks that flag and to be enabled or disabled (and that we called our GUI layer)).
In the last 10-15 years, we came up with a role of a 'Software Architect' -- that probably had a noble goal, but really degenerated into a task of dowloading the latest 'new' technology from the internet, then setting them up for some irrelevant test, and then running around the company and telling everyone how we should 'upgrade to the latest technology for some great benefit and no one can understand'.
Then, in the past 20 years we convinced our customers that they cannot really expect bug-free software from us, but instead we can do something that does most of what they want and fix the rest later. So then the customers simply stopped believing us that we can manufacture something that works, the only thing that customers can do is to request us to do something by some date (therefore the unreasonable (but always movable
Look at the press releases of the public software companies: they do not mention what functionality their products have, how fault-tolerant they are... instead they mention what Tools they used to build their stuff (XML, EJB, Java, OO, UML, web-enabled and wireless ready). And for a while the stock market rewarded just that. But have you seen a profitable hardware design and manufacturing company bragging in their press releases what compiler or VLSI design tool they use, instead of highlighting the functionality of their product?
-----------
We also convinced ourselves that there are no 'methods' to desing software without bugs, instead we'd rather rely on QA to test it -- because we think software is like nothing else -- it cannot be VERIFIED for CORRECTNESS by us.
And that is fundamentally what needs to be changed: we must be able to use mathematically sound algorithm verification techniques and we should ask our tool vendors NOT to deliver to us a syntax change every 3 years, but build for us tools that would do what do data-flow analysis on the program logic level, that would simulate timings and parallel execution for concurrency enabled applications (threading/etc) and so on.
-----
Of course there has been a lot of progress in the computer science and mathematics that supports it, but most of it did not make in to commercial app development world.
Compilers are better, language parsers are better, OSses are better -- but those are the tools where the science was used to design algorithms (like graph coloring for register allocations, or other optimization techniques)
And hardware, of course is much better --
the commercial software 'looks' like made leaps and bounds -- but it is really some of tools that we use underneath that made us look better.
