Among the constant hubbub of intellectual property disputes, security alarms and industry politics, it's easy to forget that everything depends on people writing programs. In that respect, computing has changed less over the years than you might think: despite constant promises of automatic programming languages, natural language systems and AI-heavy program generators, nearly all software these days is written by furrowed brow and arcane ritual.
The latest technology with pretensions for taking us away from all that is MDA, the Model Driven Architecture: use this, its proponents say, and you can create software that runs on lots of different computers without worrying over programming details.
Twenty years ago, it was fashionable to classify programming languages in terms of generations, from first generation languages to fourth or fifth. 1GL are the raw bits of machine code that the processor understands, and 2GL the assembler language that both humans and computers could understand. 3GL are the 'high level' languages with which most programmers are familiar -- BASIC, C, Java and the like.
Such ideas were popular with marketing men and scary-eyed prophets of the programming future, because they implied that 4GL were going to provide as big a leap forward in software creation as high level languages -- "PRINT "Hello, World!" -- were from assembler's cryptic "mov ax,word ptr _io_evnt", which were themselves better than 10111001,10011010. 4GL, we were told, would let you spend all your time describing what you wanted in a language close to English, and the magic machinery would turn that into real computer code.
You may have noticed that this never happened. There's an old computer joke: make a computer programmable in English, and you'll find programmers can't write that either. As anyone who's had to maintain other people's software for a living will tell you, this is uncommonly true. No matter what language you write in, you're supposed to describe what you're thinking in a running commentary included in the source code, but in practice this rarely happens. Programmers see themselves as coders first, not narrative writers: adding comments isn't thought to help in the actual writing of the software -- it's there for posterity, and the psyche of the software creator has little room for that.
Talkback
Sounds nice. But.....
But it's messing with rice-bowls: There are legions of coders who know how to make code do things, but who either can't think or aren't interested in thinking in models.
But it's messing with aesthetics: A good chunk of the people who got into this game did so because of the love of seeing behind the curtain. This kind of approach turns the curtain into a solid steel door with a biometric lock.
But it's limiting to innovation: Once you turn the curtain into a locked door, you set specific standards for innovation, and thus decrease its rate. Visionary individuals will be prevented from deploying solutions because they don't fit into the modeling framework.
I've no doubt that modeling-driven approaches will become central to software development. But if they expect to make decent progress, it's advocates will have to address to these cultural and pragmatic issues, lest the inevitable failures cause it to be damned as yet another wave of hype.
Ask any coder a simple question ?
Have most of the projects that you have worked on been ..... ?
A) A brand new system
B) An upgrade or add-on to an existing system
Yep, you've guest it! The answer would be 'B' in most cases.
Why oh why, has the software industry never really caught on to this fact ? Programs are almost never these days written from scratch! This is why .Net and Java do not rule to the roost.
UML is fine, but what if an system was never written using UML in the first place. Have you ever tried reverse-engineering an system into UML ??? I have just done just that! and it's taken 6 months on a medium sized enterprise app.
The only way I can see the coding industry speed up is to help us easily move the past foward into the future.
Till then, I'm going to carry on, carrying around my 15 year old copy of "Code Complete"