04.14.11
Why We Still Write Programs
[Cartoon]
With all of the improvements in the development of software, we still simply write programs. In the original movie, Tron (1982), there were users, programs, and an operating system. In the recent movie, Tron: Legacy (2011), the concepts were still the same. There were users, programs, and an operating system. Even Hollywood could not find a way to show any significant change.
In the last thirty years the biggest changes have been in the size and complexity of the developed solutions and in the speed and capacity of computers. These changes pushed project managers to find methods to move projects along faster and to improve the quality of the products produced. These changes pushed the development environment to find better methods to communicate and control the component development and integration. These changes have led the entire industry towards major vendor or open source infrastructure. The infrastructure has even moved into the clouds.
How could we have gone for thirty years and not found a better way than programming to train our computers? Is it the result of the current development environment preventing change? Is it just the way things are and we must accept it?
There may be something to the idea that the development environment is preventing change. For years there have been approaches to certify those that provide the programming. Those that are certified go from one client to another doing almost the same thing. Why not? It is the thing they are certified to do. This in a sense certifies that building programs is the proper way to train computers (training through programming).
Computer programs are made up of instructions that follow a programmer’s defined order of steps based upon the conditions of the information processed. Multiple human-readable computer languages are available that can be translated for the computer to understand. These languages have become better over time to handle event-processing and exceptions so important in our real-time computing environment.
What is needed is a revolutionary approach that will layer the programming components in much the same way electronic components were pushed down into microchips. This does not eliminate programming, it hides it. This will commoditize what we know today as software.
For this revolution to take place there must be standards for the manufacturing of components and there must be automatic wiring between the components. There have been many ideas for manufacturing components but very little has been presented for automatic wiring.
We will continue with customer-specific programming until components can be commoditized. The challenge to commoditization will be answered by our ability to train computers to understand the components and to have the smarts to put components together like a puzzle. We should be able to ask our computers for their help and have them figure out what is available to assist us.
I believe that this ability for computers to “think” for us will come from the semantic-web. The semantic-web will be the storehouse that our computers can utilize to help them put together unique solutions. Until this takes place, we will still have users, write programs, and run them on operating systems.
Enterprise Architects are well-aware of the continuing evolution of technology. They creatively look for technology convergence that can provide breakthroughs in thinking. We are at one of those convergent junctions today. What is about to happen will give non-professional information technologists control of their use of automation in their business. No longer will they simply peer through windows and see only what applications let them see. They will be able to go inside, see how things work, and control their automation. – Enterprise Architects Masters of the Unseen City
Closing the Business / IT gap.
