Q&A: Software's advance is so steady, you probably don't even notice it
The performance of hardware -- be it microprocessors, storage systems or networks -- has increased exponentially over the years. Why has progress in software been so slow? Sometimes people think we are at a plateau with software. But I'd like to refute that. It's making enormous strides, and on a pretty steady basis. It's been 50 years since John Backus, the inventor of Fortran, wrote his seminal paper on "automatic programming" to describe the translation from Fortran to machine code. Why "automatic programming"? Because at the time, Fortran seemed so highly descriptive and problem-oriented. Now the old Fortran seems very low-level and mechanistic. This same cycle has happened in the world of information systems and databases -- remember the "automatic programming" promise of [fourth-generation programming languages]?
