The Dawn of Software Engineering

The Dawn of Software Engineering: From Turing to Dijkstra
Edgar G. Daylight

Edgar sent me a review copy of his book a while back—it made for quite interesting reading and gave me new perspective on the historical origins of my field. I daresay many readers of this blog might be interested in giving it a read.

Alan Turing is widely regarded today as the father of digital computers. But as Daylight argues in this fascinating historical account of the development of computer programming as a discipline in the 1950s and 60s, the real story is much more complicated. Turing’s ideas didn’t actually have much influence on the building of the first computers themselves—but did gradually come to influence the practice of writing computer programs.

It will be interesting to compare and contrast this book with George Dyson’s book Turing’s Cathedral, which I have just begun reading—though I’m not far enough along to make any comparisons yet.

As an aside, I find it interesting that the subfield Dijkstra called “software engineering” —the subfield that was influenced by Turing’s ideas—really seems to comprise what is now known as “programming languages”. “Software engineering” now means something completely different, focusing on the business-oriented, large-scale aspects of building software systems. It’s difficult to imagine “software engineering” these days being influenced by Turing’s ideas (or abstract mathematical ideas, period—though perhaps I am being uncharitable).