The beginning of Software Enginnering

It began in the late 50’s and the early 60’s as computers were introduced to universities and research institutions. Computers quickly became indispensable for many, and programming soon became an activity under appeal. Programming, however, had no interaction with a computer, programmers would give the program to a dispatcher, who queued the programs, and the results came hours or days later.

Coding was almost too difficult, and, in order to ease this process, formal notations were created. These notations are now known as programming languages. The first one was Fortran by IBM in 1957, followed by Algol in 1958, and Cobol by the US Department of Defense in 1962.

Computer capabilities had grown, and with it, programs and programmers demands; henceforth, a friendlier programming language was created known as PL/1. Programming languages and compilers became a principal cornerstone of computing science. [1] C was created to be capable of doing software development in UNIX. That’s how programming took a leap backward, where languages were gaining high level features, but C is only higher level than assembly code.

Ever since, different compilers and programming languages have been created, with different methods, and objectives. Procedural, modular, and object-oriented languages are some of the most known ones. For example, Java, Ruby, C, C++, HTML, Python, etc. and software engineering has grown exponentially. It has grown to a point where future expects lots of software engineering contributions.

Software Engineering has been so important that it is not only considered professionalism, but also art or craft.

References:

[1]: http://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Miscellaneous/IEEE-Annals.pdf