Grady Booch on the Future in Software Engineering

I was privileged to hear Grady Booch deliver a keynote on the Future in Software Engineering. Here are my notes of some important statements and interesting soundbytes.

• Software is an invisible thread, and hardware is the loom on which we weave the fabric of computing.
• Developing software is like making love: there are mechanics involved, but in the end its key element is love.
• (Regarding the use of computers at wartime): Computing is woven on the loom of sorrow.
• The entire history of software engineering is a rise in the levels of abstraction.
• Early structured methodologies were very waterfallish, because the risks of failure were very high.
• Dominant design enables the rise of platforms.
• Key principles of software engineering: Abstractions, separation of concerns, simplicity.
• The core system in the US IRS is written in IBM 360 assembly language.
• Old code never dies: you have to kill it.
• My manager has the illusion of managing me, and I accept the illusion I can be managed.
• Every line of code you write has human and ethical implications, for we are changing the world we live in.
• You can't outsource innovation.
• It's easy to apply agile in small teams, but difficult to teams of teams.
• (Inside a GE MRI scanner): Oh my God I know the people who wrote the software for this! I'm really happy they used UML and formal methods.
• The fundamental premise of science is that the cosmos is understandable; the fundamental premise of our domain is that the cosmos is computable.

Grady continued by offering some important challenges for our field.

• There is no really need for new programming languages, apart from those that nonprogrammers can use.
• What can we do to better assist the work of teams?
• What are the best practices for systems of systems whose components are guaranteed unreliable and untrustworthy?
• What higher-order languages do we need for programming massive neural networks?
• You think debugging is hard now? Wait till you have to deal with systems that learn. How can we debug such systems?

The keynote finished with the following statements and a well-deserved standing ovation.

• Software is the invisible writing that whispers the stories of possibility to our hardware.
• It is a privilege to be software developer, because we change the world.
• It is a responsibility to be software developer, because we change the world.

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