Month: April 2010

The other impediment to software engineering research

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In the decades since structured programming, many of the advances in software engineering have come out of non-university sources, mostly of four kinds: Start-up technology companies  (who played a large role, for example, in the development of object technology). Industrial research labs, starting with Xerox PARC and Bell Labs. Independent (non-university-based) author-consultants.  Independent programmer-innovators, who start open-source communities … Read more




Barbie to the rescue

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Efforts to attract more women to computer science evoke C. Northcote Parkinson’s analysis of the progression of the British Navy after World War I: ever more admirals, ever fewer ships [1]. There have been some successes, notably at Carnegie Mellon [2], but mostly we tear our hair in despair while percentages of female informatics students … Read more




Programming on the cloud?

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I am blogging live from the “Cloud Futures” conference organized by Microsoft in Redmond [1]. We had two excellent keynotes today, by Ed Lazowska [1] and David Patterson. Lazowska emphasized the emergence of a new kind of science — eScience — based on analysis of enormous amounts of data. His key point was that this … Read more