"Software development is dead": can you smell something?
I think it's the smell of an overcooked prediction...
I just saw
this over at the ever-fun
ZDNet blogverse. "Software development will cease to exist"...? Riiiiiight.
I have a lot of respect for Daryl Plummer generally, and he wouldn't have got where he is today without being smart. But what's happened here? Has his brain been tampered with by an evil underground cabal of SaaS vendors?
A great friend of mine spent a long time in the 1990s working at Oracle in the Consulting group. We spoke sometimes about his work and he told me on a couple of occasions: "this stuff we're doing with Oracle CASE...it's amazing. Soon people won't need to do software development any more: we'll use CASE tools to generate code from models."
You know what? The Oracle CASE tool was pretty good: it really could go a long way towards generating workaday database applications with no coding. And where Oracle left off, companies like Forte, NatSystems, Dynasty, USoft and other (most now deceased of course) "second-generation model-based development" vendors did some amazing things. But even then, development was still involved. And then what happened? CASE and
4GL were elbowed out of the way by... Java. A retrograde step in the world of enterprise software engineering, if ever I saw one. We just get to the point where we can use advanced tools / high-level languages to enable us to quickly build and change cross-platform applications: and boom! We're back to hand-cranking
3GL code. (At least, thank heavens, Java allowed us to stop thinking about pointers.)
The idea that "development is dead" wasn't true in the days of CASE, and it still isn't true. And it will not be true for a very long time indeed. Even when, in a significant proportion of scenarios, enterprises procure SaaS solutions, there will still be other scenarios that people want to address with software development. And even in scenarios where SaaS solutions are heavily used, development will not go away. They'll need to be integrated with each other and with other things. And these days, one thing I think you *can* say pretty sweepingly is that all integration is development, and all development is integration.
Mainstream enterprise app software development is getting easier all the time, but it won't go away. I predict that with a probability of 1.
