Feedback: Software Development Paradigm Trap

Larry Dickson - 8/4/2006

Hi Mark,

In your article "Escape the software development trap" (Embedded.com 05/29/06), you say,

"Here's a thought. Suppose we pursued the teamwork model with a vengeance and decided that for every small task within a larger computing job, we assign another processor. Suppose that every software 'object' or every subroutine call is a processor."

There are a few (largely orphaned) software communities that have been doing this sort of thing successfully for 20 years (occam, Erlang, CSP; generically, process-oriented). They solved the problem of how to make software processes behave strictly as separate processors. The key word is "strictly."

I dug into the question of why the software world, as you say, has gone so disastrously wrong, especially when the right way is known. I discovered the problem is metaphor (the opposite of "strictly"). I've written about this, if you are interested.

Larry Dickson

Naturally, I was interested. Larry has quite a bit more to say on this subject, which can be found at his web site, www.tjoccam.com. Check it out.
- Mark