Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Symposium on Programming Languages, Jack Little lamented the ten-
dency of manufacturers to design languages “for use by some sub-human
species in order to get around training and having good programmers.”
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When the Department of Defense proposed ADA as a solution to yet
another outbreak of the software crisis, it was trumpeted as a means of
“replacing the idiosyncratic 'artistic' ethos that has long governed soft-
ware writing with a more effi cient, cost-effective engineering mind-set.”
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As was mentioned earlier, object-oriented programming enthusiasts
advocate for “a software industrial revolution based on reusable and
interchangeable parts that will alter the software universe as surely as
the industrial revolution changed manufacturing.”
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Once again, the
desirability of such a revolution, and its attendant implications for the
character and quality of programming labor, is not universally recog-
nized; witness the recent debate about outsourcing, which ties the history
of the software crisis into a much larger and longer-running one about
globalism, job protection, workers' rights, and national identity.
All of this is not to deny the remarkable success of the software indus-
try or the accomplishments of aspiring software engineers. In fact, the
success of software—in the face of a seemingly perpetual and unchanging
rhetoric of crisis—is precisely what makes this history so interesting and
relevant to contemporary practitioners. This is perhaps one of the few
situations in which it actually is true that those who cannot learn from
history are doomed to repeat it.
Historians of technology have long argued that all technologies are,
at least to a certain degree, socially constructed. This is simply to say
that the physical design of an artifact is inextricably infl uenced by its
larger environment. In the 1950s and 1960s, the electronic digital com-
puter was introduced into the well-established technical and social
systems of the modern business organization. Like all new technologies,
the computer took its shape from—and helped to shape—its social, cul-
tural, and technological context. As the computer became an increasingly
important part of the modern corporate organization, control over its
use and identity became increasingly contested. The confl icting needs and
agendas of users, manufacturers, managers, and programmers all became
wrapped up in a highly public struggle for control over the professional
territory opened up by the technology of computing. Thinking about
the software crisis—and the invention of the discipline of software engi-
neering—as a series of interconnected social and political negotiations,
rather than an isolated technical decision about the one best way
to develop software components, provides an essential link between
