Software [R]evolution: A roundtable

Software improvements continue to pervade the growing interconnected web of computers and communication. But are these improvements merely evolutionar y or are they responsible for what some have been calling a software revolu tion? Computer turned to some of the very brightest in the field to find out. In "An Ongoing Revolution," Larry Wall thinks software design has been revo lutionary all along-to the extent that anything in this business is revolut ionary. In his view, hardware design hasn't been doing any better than soft ware design. In "Programming for Everyone," David A. Taylor thinks scripting language te chnology lacks anything new or exciting and it all seems to be stuck in tha t awkward compromise-too hard for nonprogrammers to do much with and too wi mpy for real programming languages. In "Making Software Work Together," Chris Horn thinks middle-ware solves co mplex integration challenges and enables the delivery of exciting new appli cations and solutions. But a blizzard of competing technologies risks compl ete confusion for the developers and their organizations in the short term. In "Extracting Useful Patterns," Paul Bassett discusses how software techno logy improvements are limited only by the capacity to extract useful patter ns from apparent novelty, which itself can be improved by software. In "Integration: A New Style of Programming," John K. Ousterhout predicts t hat fur a business to introduce new technologies, it must be able to integr ate them with existing systems. In "Domain Engineering and Reuse," Martin L. Griss notices chat components and scripting are be coming the standard by which large-scale enterprise de velopment will be judged. Taken together, these technologies could radicall y change the way people do reuse. In "Thought Converging," Richard Mark Soley believes that most advances in computing have stood on the shoulders of past giants. In "Portability Is Key," Jim Waldo sees the single most revolutionary trend over the past few years as the movement toward languages that are portable . In "The Future Is Intentional," Charles Simonyi thinks Intentional Programm ing (IP) is the most exciting thing happening today in software engineering . IP is simply an OS for abstractions, a new category of metatool that coor dinates the cooperation of independently developed abstraction objects call ed intentions.