Comments on: The World's First Software Engineer

The World's First Software Engineer

Susurration — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:16:22 -0800

The World's First Software Engineer David Caminer, the System designer behind LEO, the world's first business computer, has died, aged 92. He was a true pioneer, inventing many of the standards now called systems engineering.

He failed to get into Cambridge and said later that "university seemed an irrelevance in the days of mass unemployment and hunger marches." He became a management trainee at Lyons - a catering company in London - where he was responsible for creating the world's first business application of computing on a system called LEO and the standards that were later formalized as software engineering. "Americans can't believe this," Paul Ceruzzi, a historian of computing and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, said in an interview last week. "They think you're making it up. It really was true."

By: yort

yort — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:21:06 -0800

EOT

By: CynicalKnight

CynicalKnight — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:42:39 -0800

0x2E

By: It's Raining Florence Henderson

It's Raining Florence Henderson — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 13:50:28 -0800

main() { printf("hello, underworld"); }

By: boo_radley

boo_radley — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:16:05 -0800

static void Main(string[] args){
    Console.WriteLine("Goodbye, World");
}

By: signal

signal — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:27:45 -0800

print(".")

By: Afroblanco

Afroblanco — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:29:54 -0800

Response.End();

By: aerotive

aerotive — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:38:10 -0800

By: swapspace

swapspace — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:47:17 -0800

U+2024

By: Captain Ligntning

Captain Ligntning — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:06:31 -0800

He wasn't the first software engineer. The article never said he was. It doesn't even use the word "software" anywhere. Bad poster. No cookie. The first software engineer is widely recognized to have been Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace.

By: Skorgu

Skorgu — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:06:48 -0800

puts "."

By: ZenMasterThis

ZenMasterThis — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:20:09 -0800

00101110

By: quonsar

quonsar — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:42:51 -0800

SYSTEM ABEND

By: BrotherCaine

BrotherCaine — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:46:14 -0800

*mercury flows to zero*

By: The Power Nap

The Power Nap — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:12:00 -0800

return INFINITY / 0;

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:19:35 -0800

00000000 It's Raining Florence Henderson writes "main()" main returns int, goddammit.

By: DU

DU — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:04:10 -0800

100 END The first software engineer is widely, but incorrectly, recognized to have been Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace FTFY. She didn't actually write any programs or understand that much, according to the history of Babbage I read last year.

By: Captain Ligntning

Captain Ligntning — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:39:38 -0800

DUde, you need to study more. Her contributions are widely recognized, especially given that she wrote a workable program for Bernoulli calculations. You want to disagree? That's your right. But you'd be wrong.

By: CheeseDigestsAll

CheeseDigestsAll — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:43:08 -0800

re: Ada Lovelace. I heard a lecture given by the guy who re-created Babbage's Difference Engine. He did a lot of research from original sources while building the machine and said that Ada's contributions have been wildly overblown by some, she did recognize and write about one very significant thing that no one else had observed. That computers were not merely manipulators of numbers, but that any symbol, from letters to words to images, could be represented and manipulated by machines.

By: DU

DU — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:52:26 -0800

I heard overblown as well, but I'd very much like to be proven wrong. Even the most charitable description has a single algorithm. At best that's a single "contribution" and would make her the first vaporware programmer, not software engineer.

By: GeorgeBickham

GeorgeBickham — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:38:29 -0800

Detailed discussion [BBC audio] on Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage's contributions to computation. (Executive summary: they made major advances which were entirely forgotten and had no influence on subsequent computer design or theory).

By: Susurration

Susurration — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:13:59 -0800

Captain Lightning, you need to distinguish between a software engineer and a programmer. I would be one of the first to fight Ada Lovelace's corner re being the first programmer. Software engineering on the other hand is a discipline. David Caminer created the first set of software process standards and defined programming conventions that were adopted by the British Computer Society. These led to the creation of Software Engineering as a discipline.

By: humanfont

humanfont — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:33:33 -0800

they made major advances which were entirely forgotten and had no influence on subsequent computer design or theory That is to say entirely forgotten and having no influence on subsequent design theory until now. It's a little like saying Aristotle was entirely forgotten and had no influence on subsequent development of Europe.

By: GeorgeBickham

GeorgeBickham — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 21:47:06 -0800

humanfont: point. I should have said "have had no influence."

By: Captain Ligntning

Captain Ligntning — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 22:14:15 -0800

DU, using a trivial Wikipedia article is not research, nor is that article remotely complete. Do more research. Susurration, as a professional software and systems engineer of 30 years experience, I'm well aware of the differences. I've read all of the Babbage and Lovelace papers. Have you? If so, I'd love to discuss them in detail with you. If not, then you're not well equipped to argue with anyone.

By: tellurian

tellurian — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:51:12 -0800

main() { printf("helleo, world"); }

By: tellurian

tellurian — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:57:48 -0800

Busted link (new name) is here.

By: Susurration

Susurration — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:40:50 -0800

Captain Lightning, sounds like we have more in common than I thought ... :-) But I still beg to differ. Suffice it to say that, as well as being a practitioner myself, I have researched the topic in (probably) as much detail as you -- and I believe that David Caminer's contribution was different - and more significant to the discipline of SE, which is about roles and processes. Whereas Ada's contribution was more significant to data processing, which is about algorithms and mathematical relationships. Without the latter, we could not write programs. Without the former, we could not develop business applications of programs.

By: Susurration

Susurration — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:42:42 -0800

Wow - thanks tellurian, for the LEO link! I knew this one existed, but I could not find it for my original post. This stuff is really, really fascinating!

By: BrotherCaine

BrotherCaine — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:50:56 -0800

If the LEO computer could be made operational again, would there be any regulations prohibiting it because of the mercury?