One lesson I took from that paper was just how immature the modern software industry is. If you ask a software engineer to describe a system graphically they'll produce diagrams that look like the biologist's, not like the electrical engineer's. There's a general lack of standardized, accurate, and useful terminology or even models to describe the high-level structure of software. The best we have are a few analogies, some described design patterns, and low-level data structures and algorithms. We can describe things on the level of gears or resistors but we don't have a good vocabulary for things on the level of transmissions, engines, ALUs, or switch-mode power supplies.
Worse, we don't seem to care a lot about this lack, largely because it isn't perceived. A lot of devs think that we're in the space age when it comes to software, instead of virtually the stone age. And then we wonder why our software tends towards the "big ball of mud" model oh so often.
Worse, we don't seem to care a lot about this lack, largely because it isn't perceived. A lot of devs think that we're in the space age when it comes to software, instead of virtually the stone age. And then we wonder why our software tends towards the "big ball of mud" model oh so often.