Recently I read a final report of a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The project’s naive goals were identified as follows: First, how can easy programming be achieved (in particular, for non-experts)? Second, how can a mechanism be realized that allows hiding the difficult parts of parallel programming?After more than 30 years of programming we ought to know that the design of complex software is inherently difficult. This despite of the fact that, for decades, the industry has been advertising programmers’ positions by claiming that programming is easy. Later on, when doubts arose even to the advertisers, they switched to promising a wide variety of tools to facilitate the arduous tasks. Tools became the slogan; the right tools, paired with clever tricks and serious managenment methods, would work wonders. Then Edsger Dijkstra called Software Engineering “Programming in spite of the fact that you can’t”.
Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence. A good designer must rely on experience, on precise, logic thinking; and on pedantic exactness. No magic will do. In the light of all this it is particularly sad that in many informatics curricula, programming in the large is badly neglected. Design has become a non-topic. As a result, software engineering has become the El Dorado for hackers. The more chaotic a program looks, the smaller the danger that someone will take the trouble of inspecting and debunking it.