The Promise, the Limits, the Beauty of Software
Starting with Bjarne Stroustrup’s observation “our civilization runs on software”, Grady Booch offered a thought provoking overview of the history and promise of software at this year’s BCS Turing lecture, taking listeners from the austere beauty of Alan Turing’s 1930s thought experiments through to “the rise of the machines” in 2030.
Booch is an interesting, relaxed and witty speaker, whose asides on the superiority of OS X to Windows, George Bush and Google (”Am I the only one who thinks there’s a company in desperate need of some adult supervision?”) provided comic relief in an at times informationally dense speech.
One point that intrigued me was his observation that much of the history of computing is unrecorded, existing only in the “tribal memory” of the greybeards. He foresees the emergence of both software artists and historians who might translate and record some of the strange beauty of code for non-programmers as well as formally archiving a form of communication in danger of vanishing with the death of its authors.
The full lecture is available as a recording from the link below and is well worth watching.