IN PRAISE OF PRACTICE

What a variety of issues Ed Yourdon addresses in his ''A Tale of Two F utures.'' in that diverse collection of topics, I'd like to focus a fa irly obscure part of what he has to say: the quality of today's rammer s. Not because it's important to Ed, necessarily, but because it's imp ortant to me. First, let me tell you where I'm coming from. I like to tell people that my head is in software's academic world, but that my heart is in its practice. What do I mean by this? I have done the acad emic software thing. I've been a professor of software engineering, th e director of a software engineering program, a visiting professor at a university in Sweden, and a member of the Software Engineering Insti tute's technical staff (which, at the time, was far more academic than practical). I've accumulated more than a decade's worth of academic e xperience. I have done the industrial software thing. I've worked as a maintainer, then a developer,team leader,acquisition manager,and R&D specialist. I've served as a consultant. All in all, I've accumulated more than three decades of industrial experience. Drawing on this mixe d background to mull over the formative experiences of my career, I fi nd that it's the practitioner moments that I come back to. I recall th e brilliant, strange, and wonderful developers I worked with and the e xciting, challenging, and world-changing applications I worked on. Fro m deep in the trenches, I acquired the gritty, hard-won lessons that l et me solve real problems with sheer brainpower, getting the awesomely dumb computer to do awesomely brilliant things by infusing it with ju st the right software. I still marvel at what we practitioners have ac complished. For these reasons, I take offense when people knock softwa re practice. And Ed has, In spades, with his prediction of software's future.