Journal en relisant "No Silver Bullet—Essence and accident in software engineering"

Bonjour,

je jette des vieux papiers, et je tombe sur "No Silver Bullet—Essence and accident in software engineering" de F. Brooks (1986). Quarante ans.

C'est un papier assez connu je crois, et je me suis dit que ce paragraphe vous ferait peut être sourire…

“Automatic” programming.

For almost 40 years, people have been anticipating and writing about
“automatic programming”, the generation of a program for solving a
problem from a statement of the problem specifications.

Some people today write as if they expected this technology to provide
the next breakthrough.

Parnas implies that the term is used for glamour and not semantic content,
asserting,

"In short, automatic programming always has been a euphemism for
programming with a higher-level language than was presently available
to the programmer."

He argues, in essence, that in most cases it is the solution method,
not the problem, whose specification has to be given.

Exceptions can be found. The technique of building generators is very
powerful, and it is routinely used to good advantage in programs for
sorting.

Some systems for integrating differential equations have also permitted
direct specification of the problem. The system assessed the parameters,
chose from a library of methods of solution, and generated the programs.

• These applications have very favorable properties:
• The problems are readily characterized by relatively few parameters.
• There are many known methods of solution to provide a library of alternatives.
• Extensive analysis has led to explicit rules for selecting solution techniques, given problem parameters.

It is hard to see how such techniques generalize to the wider world
of the ordinary software system, where cases with such neat properties
are the exception. It is hard even to imagine how this breakthrough in
generalization could conceivably occur.