This paper is a fictitious recounting of the history of software development and the various choices that have driven it to where it is now. It is written in an interview style, where the author explains how the various practices and perspectives of software development evolved.

Early in this interview process, the author delves into the notion that once a perspective is assumed through whatever means, human thinking as a consequence becomes vastly limited in taking up other perspectives due to such things as biases, prejudices, and opinions about its correctness. He also reiterates the lofty goal of any software development as the compelling need and drive to create simple, efficient, compact, and reusable software. He walks the reader through how incredibly efficient early computing systems seemed compared to the earlier ways of doing things. He also captures the notion of fads driving relative importance, using realistic examples of an “opened up” Cuba, whereby people (that is, resources) went to work for sectors that were more economically profitable, and thereby certain areas were indeed neglected.

Further along, he also reiterates the fact that systems more often than not did not fail for technical reasons, but for what he calls cultural reasons, whether social, psychological, or political. In another response, the author jabs at where we are--a perpetual software crisis: since 1968, a divergence between demand versus supply! Lastly, he also recaps the difficulty we have had in capturing requirements succinctly and precisely (mathematically speaking) and how the scientific community had tied it with the concept of scientific management, thereby making it harder to accomplish.

Later, the author mulls over the illogical needs of business, and where despite the lack in technology, they have some basic infrastructure that is effective and lean as well as inexpensive to develop; computing as a discipline had focused inward to expanding theory, and reduced itself to formal methods and so on, which was not effective in addressing what businesses needed to achieve. He attributes these to academic greed as computing evolved as a discipline, with its students learning nothing outside of the discipline itself, in terms of real-world needs.

Finally, he also touches upon the persistent malaise with respect to software development projects and project management processes in general; despite all of the advances over the past 50-plus years, the percentage of systems that are delivered on time, and on budget, with functionality that is useful five years later always remains at 10 to 15 percent. He also picks on current critical systems, such as aircraft navigation, with the caveat that at their core, many of these algorithms are still the ones developed in the 1960s and 1970s and that all later attempts to replace them have been expensive failures.

In summary, the paper provides a good historical perspective on the evolution of software development processes, as well as the forces and constraints that shaped the direction and evolution of the various approaches we have at present. It leaves the reader with the nudge to be more curious about more fundamental issues such as user-centric design and flexible architecture with the analogy of a living system.