Ground-breaking

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




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




One cheer for incremental research

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[Note: an updated version of this article (June 2011) appears in the Communications of the ACM blog.] The world of research funding, always a little strange, has of late been prey to a new craze: paradigm-shift mania. We will only fund twenty curly-haired cranky-sounding visionaries in the hope that one of them will invent relativity. The rest of … Read more