Responsible Adults

If some programmers are not behaving maturely (see Programmers as Children), what can we do as responsible adults to make things better?  There are many answers, and they depend on who is meant by "we".

First, however, I must mention what is perhaps Fred Brooks's best-known paper, "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering" (IEEE Computer, April 1987).  In it, Brooks claims that software engineering is hard in essence, and therefore nothing can make it easy.  While a lot of progress has been made on what Brooks calls accidental difficulties, which have to do with the way represent the abstract concepts of software engineering, these only expose the essential difficulty of the conceptual structures underlying software development.  The silver bullet is the only effective way to kill werewolves; Brooks claims that no such magical cure can be found for the ills of software development.

This is, of course, a provocative statement, and it sparked lively discussion.  But in spite of various opinions to the contrary, no silver bullet has yet been found.  This is not to say that progress has not been made.  Even if the essential problem is difficult, programmers are still being asked to develop larger and larger systems.  They should use whatever cures are available, even if they cure only the symptoms and not the disease.

So what can we do?  The most important thing is to be aware of the difficulties and look for ways to avoid them.  There is no substitute for careful thinking, and no tool will do that for us until true artificial intelligence is available.  (While great progress is being made – for example, see the Watson Jeopardy challenge – don't hold your breath waiting for "automatic programming" in the sense of the computer writing its own programs.)  More concretely, there are many practices we can follow in order to make software development easier, more productive, more reliable, and also more fun.  These fall into several categories, including methodology and process, languages and tools, and education.  I will have something to say about each of these, but only a book the size of an encyclopedia can do justice to them all.

There are many software-developoment methodologies, and none is perfect.  In fact, Daniel Berry of the University of Waterloo has a paper titled "The Inevitable Pain of Software Development: Why There Is No Silver Bullet".  Another provocative paper, and one of the responses to the one by Brooks, this one focuses on why no methodology can ever be a silver bullet.  Berry claims that every methodology has some inherent pain associated with it.  It may be all pain, as in the maligned waterfall method, or the pain could be just a small part of it.  In any case, it is unavoidable, and developers therefore evade it by not following the methodology rigorously, thus defeating its purpose.  But this is like parenting: although no one knows of a sure method to raise perfect children, that doesn't keep us from trying.  In the same way, the fact that there is no perfect development methodology doesn't mean that we should not attempt to find the best process for our situation and follow it to the best of our ability.

As I mentioned before, I'm a great believer in tools, and spend a lot of time developing new tools.  I have also been involved with computer-science education, at both the university and high-school levels, and I have a lot to say about these topics.  Stay tuned!