Software

The word “engineering” was applied to software deliberately, not descriptively. At a 1968 NATO conference in Garmisch, computer scientists chose the phrase “software engineering” as a provocation—an aspirational demand that the discipline impose on itself the rigor that physics imposes on civil and mechanical work. The word was not a recognition; it was a challenge. Fifty years later, the challenge remains unresolved. And the discomfort that trained engineers feel when they move into software—the sense that the ground is somehow less solid, the rules more negotiable, the stakes harder to calibrate—is not a failure of imagination. It is a correct perception of something genuinely different. …

In 1990, at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, there was an IEEE magazine in the library whose pages had never been cut. This was not metaphor. Before the era of perfect-bound paperbacks and digital everything, some periodicals arrived folded, signatures intact, and you had to run a knife or a finger along the edge to open each section. If the pages were still sealed, it meant no one had read it. Someone had received it, shelved it, and forgotten it. The information inside was technically available and practically inaccessible — a kind of knowledge in suspension, waiting for someone to care. …

The lathe doesn’t tell the machinist where to put the shaft. The oscilloscope doesn’t tell the electrical engineer where to route the signal. The crane doesn’t tell the civil engineer where to put the walls. Every mature engineering discipline figured this out early and never looked back: the physical problem drives the design. The tools are means, not ends. Software was the exception — and for a remarkably long time. …

I. The Object’s Triumph Grady Booch is a convenient name to pin on something that happened in the 1980s and 1990s: the triumph of the object. Before that, software was process — COBOL verbs, Fortran subroutines, C functions. You described what the system does, not what it is. Programs had flows, instructions, verbs. The machine executed a sequence; you followed the sequence. Then came the Unified Modeling Language, the design patterns, the notion that you could abstract reality into classes and hierarchies and responsibilities. The Gang of Four’s catalogue promised order: Observer, Strategy, Adapter. Each pattern was an object shape, a way of organizing code around nouns instead of verbs. Grady Booch’s Object-Oriented Analysis and Design became the grammar of a new way of thinking about computation: things that know things, things that do things, things that inherit from other things. …