in radiotherapy failed so badly that they distributed lethal doses of radiation to the patients, thus killing them. Before this, software developers were not a crucial part of the software design timeline.
The first language that allowed programs to be written, thus potentially creating the software engineering discipline, was called FORTRAN and was developed in 1957. FORTRAN was not like the languages that are used to program computers now, as it used punch cards. Punch cards were the program, and they would be read by the machine which would then process and execute the instructions.
Main issues
COMPLEXITY
In the software crisis, developers worked through three main issues to create a more stable workplace for software. First, designers and developers tried to eliminate complexity. Complexity is the intricacy of a piece of software, for example Google and all its products make up about 2 billion lines of code. The book ‘The Hunger Games’ has approximately 9350 lines, so if we were to put all of Googles code into books of that size, the stack of books …show more content…
Complexity can be split into two categories according to Fred Brooks who talks about the difference between accidental and essential complexity in programming in his book ‘The Mythical Man-Month’. He explains that accidental complexity is caused by tools and methods, such as needing to write and test lots of code in a language because we can't express our ideas directly. Essential complexity is exactly how it sounds, the essential difficulty of a program in order for it to work. New methods and techniques can help to reduce accidental complexity by methods such as better user interface design. This helps to cut down the time that can be spent writing code because of better languages and tools; however we cannot eliminate essential complexity without removing the entirety of the
The first language that allowed programs to be written, thus potentially creating the software engineering discipline, was called FORTRAN and was developed in 1957. FORTRAN was not like the languages that are used to program computers now, as it used punch cards. Punch cards were the program, and they would be read by the machine which would then process and execute the instructions.
Main issues
COMPLEXITY
In the software crisis, developers worked through three main issues to create a more stable workplace for software. First, designers and developers tried to eliminate complexity. Complexity is the intricacy of a piece of software, for example Google and all its products make up about 2 billion lines of code. The book ‘The Hunger Games’ has approximately 9350 lines, so if we were to put all of Googles code into books of that size, the stack of books …show more content…
Complexity can be split into two categories according to Fred Brooks who talks about the difference between accidental and essential complexity in programming in his book ‘The Mythical Man-Month’. He explains that accidental complexity is caused by tools and methods, such as needing to write and test lots of code in a language because we can't express our ideas directly. Essential complexity is exactly how it sounds, the essential difficulty of a program in order for it to work. New methods and techniques can help to reduce accidental complexity by methods such as better user interface design. This helps to cut down the time that can be spent writing code because of better languages and tools; however we cannot eliminate essential complexity without removing the entirety of the