Software-Engineering

Ask any list of the most important pieces of software ever shipped, and four categories always appear: the operating system, email, word processing, and the spreadsheet. Of the four, the spreadsheet is the strangest. It is simultaneously the most empowering tool ever handed to a non-programmer and the largest ungoverned repository of business logic on the planet. VisiCalc, then Lotus 1-2-3, then Excel, did something no compiler or IDE has ever managed: they let a financial analyst, an operations manager, a school administrator encode real domain expertise — pricing models, forecasting logic, inventory rules — without asking anyone’s permission and without writing a single line of what programmers would recognize as code. That is the gift. It is also, by Emerson’s law, exactly where the bill comes due. …

There is a strange gap in American software. At one end sit the companies large enough to turn engineering practice into infrastructure: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and their peers can afford dedicated platform teams, internal tooling, architecture review boards, and years of accumulated institutional memory. At the other end sit the garage companies and small shops that don’t pretend to have a software development life cycle at all — they deploy from a laptop because the product is one person, the customer is waiting, and the alternative isn’t a more rigorous process but no product. Between those poles sit thousands of companies with enough software to need engineering discipline and not enough margin, attention, or organizational slack to make it a first-class concern. That middle is where most software actually gets written, and it is the part of the industry the industry’s own literature has the least to say about. …

In 1989, two people were writing programs that generated language out of structure rather than meaning. One of them was Tim Berners-Lee, who that year circulated a memo titled Information Management: A Proposal — the document that became the World Wide Web. The other was a professor in a hallway in Medellín, who wrote a hundred lines of Turbo Prolog to make fun of his colleagues. I knew about the second one. The first I only read about later, the way everyone did. But the two were closer in spirit than the distance between Geneva and the Universidad de Antioquia would suggest. Both were betting that if you got the relationships right — between documents, between words — the content could take care of itself. One bet built the modern internet. The other got pinned to a cork board and read by people who never realized they were the joke. …