Symptoms Of Our Youth

It is easy to forget just how very young our industry is. We all know that our intellectual history goes back at least as far as BlaisePascal, and many would push back even further. But our practical history is scarcely 20 years long. Oh, there were working computers long before that, but until the microcomputer explosion, the industry was not exposed to either the supply or the demand needed to create the critical mass on which we currently founder.

Confronted with an absolutely explosive demand for product, our youthful industry struggles gamely just to tread water, intellectually and practically.

These pages (and many developers not represented here) seek desperately for a set of metaphors that will make sense of our process. The drive behind the SoftwareIsArt concept is one such effort, but there are literally dozens floating around the wiki. And why not? Whole corporations exist for the purpose of promulgating 'methods' of making software, which are for the most part attempts to translate such metaphors into practical step-by-step guides.

Spend some time with adolescents. (It's good for you and good for them, if you can manage to keep your sense of humor and affection.) Watch them declaim, watch them theorize, watch them make metaphor of their life. Watch them choose good decisions and awful ones. Watch them struggle for certainty in the face of a life that somewhere William Barrett and the Existentialists call 'dense, opaque, and unintelligible.'

Then come back to the study of our youthful industry.