Long-term Approach to Software
In his essay Software That Lasts 200 Years, Dan Bricklin calls for an approach to software that takes into account long-term consequences. Bricklin compares software production to building projects - houses, bridges, roads - that are planned and built to last for a very long time. By contrast, “software has historically been built assuming that it will be replaced in the near future (remember the Y2K problem)”.
Roads and bridges are the infrastructure of our society. But computer systems are also becoming part of that infrastructure. There is lots of software that “keeps our societal records, controls and monitors our physical infrastructure (from traffic lights to generating plants), and directly provides necessary non-physical aspects of society such as connectivity.” This is what Dan Bricklin calls “Societal Infrastructure Software”.
Societal Infrastructure Software is something that must last as long as roads and bridges. Electric health records, for instance, should exist for the whole life of a person - and should be readable by any computer, also decades from now. Large software infrastructure projects should be similar to building projects, having many contractors, well planned and not burdened by licensing agreements. Social Infrastructure Software should be open and free.
It is in this kind of cases where the importance of free and open source software can be seen - where we look beyond the short term interests of quartal capitalism. Software is becoming more and more important every moment. Architecture is politics, and it is the architecture we are now building that will dominate the image, and the rules, of the future virtual space.
Like architecture, programming is becoming very important art - both in the aesthetic sense and in the sense of skill. But the recognition will take time. Paul Graham compares hacking to arts:
So while I admit that hacking doesn’t seem as cool as painting now, we should remember that painting itself didn’t seem as cool in its glory days as it does now.
What we can say with some confidence is that these are the glory days of hacking. In most fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the novel.
So far there is only one professor of “The Art of Computer Programming”.
