Today, we are on a journey of the industrialization of software much the same way when Autodesk invented AutoCAD in 1982 and introduced it to the engineering design and manufacturing production world.  AutoCAD offered, for the first time, a full-fidelity drawing tool that enabled a predictable and repeatable way to produce engineering diagrams that could be saved electronically in a (publicly accessible) universal file format to be used by all sorts of other CAD/CAM devices. A standard was born. In my opinion, AutoCADs virtual drawing world has done more for the engineering design and manufacturing world then any other invention in the last 20 years.  Without it, we would still be forging hammers by hand at a rate of one a month and cost several thousands of dollars a piece to produce.

 

The same revolution is now taking place over 20 years later for the software design and code production world.  The only people that really know about it are software programmers from various tool vendors around the world.  Programmers are realizing that the days of hand crafting ever increasing complex software solutions are becoming too costly and taking too long in our internet time business world.  I predict in the next 5 years we are going to see the business world using software that is heading up the knee of the exponential curve and offer business services through software automation that are going to further increase the speed of which business is performed compared to today on a scale that is unfathomable.  Just as unfathomable as the railroad once was.  Just as unfathomable as electricity once was.

 

The software industry need tools that can visualize the size and complexity of the software structures to be constructed much like how the (traditional) building industry uses architectural blueprints to visualize the design of building structures and yet, are detailed enough to cover all aspects of the building to be constructed.  Not only will this give some sort of continuity to the world of software development, but will help non-technical people understand the (equivalent) difference between constructing their 3 bedroom bungalow house and the Empire State building.  Even a lay person with no level of expertise can visualize by looking at the blueprints and generally comprehend one is much bigger and more complex than the other.
 
Right now in the software industry we have no universal way of showing size and complexity differences even amongst the programming community.  The current state of the art is still so low level and specialized, that most programmers look at these crude architectural drawings and cant infer any meaning as to what is to be built, aside from understanding what the size and complexity is.  Sure we have software modeling languages like the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and the newly introduced Domain Specific Language (DSL), but these tools and languages are still very low level compared to a buildings architectural blueprint.

 

I am not trivializing these language inventions, in fact, they have done a world of good for the software world.  However, we need to raise the level of abstraction using better modeling tools and languages so we can get ourselves out of the dark ages and into the industrialization age.

 

Raising the level of abstraction is the topic of my next post.