Antipatterns
Learn the start of software engineering, system users increasing from hundreds to millions, and how complexity and tight coupling is prone to failures.
Software crisis
Delegates to the first NATO Software Engineering Conference coined the term “software crisis” in 1968. They meant that demand for new software outstripped the capacity of all existing programmers worldwide. If that truly was the start of the software crisis, then it has never ended!
Our machines have improved by orders of magnitude, and so have the languages and libraries. The enormous leverage of open source multiplies our abilities. And of course, something like a million times more programmers are in the world now than there were in 1968.
So overall, our ability to create software has had its own kind of Moore’s law exponential curve at work. So why are we still in a software crisis? Because we’ve steadily taken on bigger and bigger challenges.
Increasing number of users
In those hazy days of the client/server system, we used to think of a hundred active users as a large system, but now we think about millions. That’s up from the ...