Historia de la ingeniería de software

Estribar software ha cambiado y evolucionada durante los años y gracias a la gran velocidad de crecimiento de la computación esto ocasiona que la mayoría de los aparatos puedan tener una mayor cantidad de memoria para poder hacer tareas más complicadas a una mayor velocidad.

Todo comenzó en los años de 1950 donde las personas comenzaron a hacer programas con meros fines matemáticos para facilitar el trabajo de las personas, pero más adelante conforme crecían las capacidades de las computadoras esto ocasiono que los programas se fueran complicando y lo que comenzó siendo algo relativamente sencillo a primera instancia se transformó en algo que no todas las personas podían comprender.

Esto ocasiono que los programas al ser tan complicados fueran más lentos que sus contrapartes electrónicas y la mayoría de las personas no los querían usar por ese hecho. Al ver esto Dennis Ritchie creo Unix y C lo que ayudo a las personas a comprender los códigos y dar sintaxis al mismo, pero esto para los programadores de alto nivel era como un retraso.

Después donde comenzó a resaltar la programación fue gracias a los microchips porque se dieron cuenta que podías utilizarlos para guardar código y hacer que logren algo en un espacio pequeño, mientras crecían estos componentes es su capacidad también los programas comenzaron a crecer y esto creo una sinergia enorme entre estos dos elementos.

History and Improvement of Software Development

Normally we use our electronic devices every single day of our lives. We use our mobile applications, play with our computers or even argue about the new technology. But, have you ever think about the past? How did people live without a smartphone? Or what we did to evolve from nothing to today’s technology?

A little bit of history…

There was a time were programs were only instructions to manipulate physical devices, but today software is everything to the world. Basically, without the software, our devices are obsolete.

Late in the 50’s and 60’s, programmers didn’t interact directly with computers. For making mathematical operations they delivered their programs to a technician, which returned the results some hours later. Here is where programming languages started. The FORTRAN (by IBM) and the COBOL (by the US Department of Defense) were the first programming languages used for engineering and business applications; but their effectiveness was not the best, normally they took a long time to give results, leading to loss of time and budget. This started the “Software Crisis”!!

But fortunately, in 1968 a conference (NATO) took place to find a solution to these problems.Here, the term Software Engineering was created. Their solution was to use practices of traditional engineering applied to software. More about Software Engineering

After this, the BOOM of software development started. The 70’s saw the growth of interfaces, that allows the developer to break the project into pieces. Then the 80’s gave birth to the famous “object-oriented programming”, that changed the way a user interact with the computer, by the Graphical user interface (GUI); now the device was more
friendly and easy to use.

But there were also bad things. Apparently the improvement on the hardware led to more software developers, but bad code writing.

What…Bad Coding?!

Yes! Bad code

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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

History of software engineering

The first time the term “Software Engineering” was heard by a human being was in 1968 at a conference organized by NATO, to discuss the difficulties encountered when developing large and complex systems, It was proposed that the software development process should adopt an engineering approach to reduce the costs and to lead to more reliable software.

In the 70s the fist programming environments were developed, first notions of structured programming, the Pascal programming language, Parnas’s papers on information hiding and the development of Smalltalk, which introduced the notions of object oriented development. Early use of software design methods.

In the 80s the Ada programming language introduces structured programming and information hiding. CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tools are introduced to support design methods, these tools are designed to increase the productivity and reduce the cost of software development. Development of algorithmic approaches to software costing and estimation, the first student textbook on software engineering is released. Later in the 80s OOP had a huge increase in popularity, through languages such as C++ and Objective-C. The first object-oriented design methods.

In the 90s Java is released. The rise of the Internet, international information, e-mail systems. Client – Server distributed architectures are widely used. Component-based software engineering (CBSE) is developed, it is a reuse-base approach to defining, implementing and composing loosely coupled independent components into systems. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is proposed, integrating several separately developed notations for representing object-oriented systems. Sam Kass created rock, paper, scissors, lizard, Spock.

in the early 00s the use of UML becomes widespread, whereas the use of CASE tools declines. There is a huge increase of scripting languages, such as Python, for software development. C# is developed. Inexpensive software solutions led to the development of simpler and faster methodologies

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