Great article on the issues of today’s approach to software development
This linked article from The Atlantic might be good food for thought for some in this industry, even though most of it pertains to complex machine control software. That being said, is modeling a commodity trading business any more complex than modeling and coding a Tesla Model S operating system to ensure it won’t run over pedestrians in a walkway when running on autopilot?
As an analyst, I intellectually understand why we, as an industry, continue to use virtually all same tools, concepts and logic/code (even if most of it has been re-platformed to run in something other than a client/server environment) that have existed for decades….and continue to hear the same complaints about the software that I made myself as a user some 20+ years ago – costly, complex, buggy, hard to implement/upgrade, hard to report out of, etc. This isn’t an indictment of this market or any single company in it because obviously we’re not alone regarding these issues. But still, as this article notes:
“Our current conception of what a computer program is,” he said, is “derived straight from Fortran and ALGOL in the late ’50s. Those languages were designed for punch cards.” That code now takes the form of letters on a screen in a language like C or Java (derivatives of Fortran and ALGOL), instead of a stack of cards with holes in it, doesn’t make it any less dead, any less indirect.
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