Soon … a good proportion of software, like hard goods, will be automatically manufactured, cutting the size of software teams immensely. The plight of the software engineer looks no less ominous in the future than that of the blue collar worked uprooted by the increasing application of industrial robots”
(as read on the Computer Magazine, May 1982 edition, page 86).
Clearly, some of us would like this statement to be a reality, but we are not yet there, not even close, even if some of tools that would make this possible (again, for ” a good proportion of software”, especially all the “boring” one, i.e. data-intensive applications, CRUD style, which account for most of the software built today, see also my Pareto principle applied to model-driven development) have been available for a while now.
Hopefully, reaching the future predicted in that article will be just a matter of time. We believe Stephen J. Mellor when he says: “Modeling will be commonplace in 3 years time“, something he has been repeating since 1985 🙂
FNR Pearl Chair. Head of the Software Engineering RDI Unit at LIST. Affiliate Professor at University of Luxembourg. Â More about me.
The statement reveals a complete and utter lack of understanding about the nature of software.
The equivalent of the “factory” in software is the compiler…or maybe the “cp” command once the compiler is done. The software is the design is the model is the blueprint.