A bit of a repeated theme in the construction of APPropriate Behaviour has been that I’ve tried to position certain terms or concepts in their historical context, and found it difficult, or impossible to do so with sufficient rigour. There’s an extent to which I don’t want the book to become historiographical so have avoided going too deep into that angle, but have discovered that either no-one else has or that if they have, I can’t find their work.
What often happens is that I can find a history or even many histories, but that these aren’t reliable. I already wrote in the last post on this blog about the difficulties in interpreting references to the 1968 NATO conference; well today I read another two sources that have another two descriptions of the conference and how it kicked off the software crisis. Articles like that linked in the above post help to defuse some of the myths and partisan histories, but only in very specific domains such as the term “software crisis”.
Occasionally I discover a history that has been completely falsified, such as the great sequence of research papers that “prove” how some programmers are ten (or 25, or 1000) times more productive than others or those that “prove” bugs cost 100x more to fix in maintenance. Again, it’s possible to find specific deconstructions of these memes (mainly by reading Laurent Bossavit), but having discovered the emperor is naked, we have no replacement garments with which to clothe him.
There are a very few subjects where I think the primary and secondary literature necessary to construct a history exist, but that I lack the expertise or, frankly, the patience to pursue it. For example you could write a history of the phrase “software engineering”, and how it was introduced to suggest a professionalism beyond the craft discipline that went before it, only to become a symbol of lumbering lethargy among adherents of the craft discipline that came after it. Such a thing might take a trained historian armed with a good set of library cards a few years to complete (the book The Computer Boys Take Over covers part of this story, though it is written for the lay reader and not the software builder). But what of more technical ideas? Where is the history of “Object-Oriented”? Does that phrase mean the same thing in 2013 as in 1983? Does it even mean the same thing to different people in 2013?
Of course there is no such thing as an objective history. A history is an interpretation of a collection of sources, which are themselves interpretations drawn from biased or otherwise limited fonts of knowledge. The thing about a good history is that it lets you see what’s behind the curtain. The sources used will all be listed, so you can decide whether they lead you to the same conclusions as the author. It concerns me that we either don’t have, or I don’t have access to, resources allowing us to situate what we’re trying to do today in the narrative of everything that has gone before and will go hence. That we operate in a field full of hype and innuendo, and lack the tools to detect Humpty Dumptyism and other revisionist rhetoric.
With all that said, are the histories of the software industry out there? I don’t mean the collectors like the museums, who do an important job but not the one I’m interested in here. I mean the histories that help us understand our own work. Do degrees in computer science, to the extent they consider “real world” software making at all, teach the history of the discipline? Not the “assemblers were invented in 1949 and the first binary tree was coded in 19xy” history, but the rise and fall of various techniques, fads, disciplines, and so on? Or have I just volunteered for another crazy project?
I hope not, I haven’t got a good track record at remembering my library cards. Answers on a tweet, please.
