Software Engineering: “From Craft to Industry”?

For brevity you can’t beat the following recap of software history:

Grizzled old hackers tell of going into insurance companies in the 1960s. The typical computer cost at least $500,000 and held data of great value. When Cromwell & Jeeves Insurance needed custom software, they didn’t say, “Maybe we can save a few centimes by hiring a team of guys in India.” They hired the best programmers they could find from MIT and didn’t balk at paying $10,000 for a week of hard work. Back in those days, $10,000 was enough to hire a manager for a whole year, a fact not lost on managers who found it increasingly irksome.

Managers control companies, and hence policies that irk managers tend to be curtailed. Nowadays, companies have large programming staffs earning, in real dollars, one-third of what good programmers earned in the 1960s. When even that seems excessive, work is contracted out to code factories in India. Balance has been restored. Managers are once again earning three to ten times what their technical staff earn. The only problem with this arrangement is …

This is from Philip Greenspun’s “Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing”, page 318. In case some background is required, read on.

What’s Behind “Design Patterns”

One of the few true bestsellers in the computer world is Design Patterns by Gamma, Helms, Johnson and Vlissides (“The Gang of Four”). Not only did it sell well, but its success also triggered the appearance of dozens of books with title and content conspicuously linked to the original. As the Gang acknowledged, the original itself is, if not an imitation, at least strongly inspired by another book. Their product is highly original in having its source of inspiration in an area far away from computers and software. That source is Design Patterns by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein, and the area is design in architecture. Not computer architecture, not software architecture, but architecture. To avoid confusion, I will refer to the Gang-of-Four book as “DP” and accord to the original original the honour of Design Patterns in full.

What is not widely acknowledged, and does not even seem to be known among the aficionados of DP, is that Design Patterns is but a companion to the main volume, which is The Timeless Way of Building with Christopher Alexander as sole author. That the epiphenomenon makes a great furore in the software world while the main item remains unknown is, it seems to me, remarkable. The present essay may be useful in introducing the unknown main item and arguing its relevance for the building of software.