Apropos of an earlier entry of mine on software studies, Salon is running a good piece on software archeology entitled “Prowling the Ruins of Ancient Software” (Slashdotted copy here). Two choice tidbits:
“It’s funny,” says Dave Thomas, a Dallas software consultant and co-author, with Andrew Hunt, of “The Pragmatic Programmer,” a 1999 book on software design methods. “Colleges spend a lot of time teaching people how to write code, but very few teach them how to read code. When you think about it, we programmers spend most of our time reading code, not writing code.”
[ . . . ]
“Maybe I’m horribly geeky,” says [Grady] Booch, “but I find tremendous beauty in looking at well-written software programs. There’s an elegance, a brilliance that we’re only now developing the critical means to describe. We have literary critics. We have art critics. We don’t have any software critics, yet. We need software critics, too.”
Hear, hear.
According to the article, the Computer History Museum will be sponsoring some sort of conference or meeting on software archeology this fall, but I can’t find any further information online. Something to watch for though.
Posted by mgk at July 30, 2003 06:16 PM