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November 04, 2003
Food for thought
I'll get the results of our brainstorming up shortly; in the meantime, I'll give you something to think about.
I started our workshop series (explorers club?) with the prologue from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a quote from Alan Perlis. The point of our series is probably best captured by this sentence:
I think we're responsible for stretching [these machines], setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house.
Now, consider this interview with Bertrand Meyer. Meyer holds the Software Engineering chair at ETH Zurich. This is a non-trivial thing; an academic who sits in a named chair means that their institution has decided to recognize the exceptionally excellent nature of their life's work.
I've pulled out a bit from the beginning of the interview which is indirectly-yet-directly related to our series:
There is a very revealing quote by Alan Perlis in his preface to the MIT book on Scheme, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming , by Abelson and Sussman. Alan Perlis wrote:
I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customer got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. That is typical of the kind of attitude that says "Sure, we can do whatever we like. If there's a problem we'll fix it." But that's simply not true anymore. People depend on software far too fundamentally to accept this kind of attitude. In a way we had it even easier during the dot-com boom years, between 1996 and 2000, but this is not 1998 anymore. The kind of free ride that some people were getting in past years simply doesn't exist anymore. |
Bertrand Meyer is a pretty smart guy. Is he right? Have we set out on an endeavour that's a waste of time? Or, is he missing something? Or, could it be that Perlis, in the prologue to an introductory text in computer science, was addressing a different audience, and Meyer is doing Perlis an injustice by pulling it into the context of professional Software Engineering?
Found via λ the Ultimate, a weblog about programming langauges.
Posted by at November 4, 2003 12:46 PM