Software Engineering: The Next 50 Years

It is not unreasonable to speculate on what the future of software engineering will look like in the next 50 years. Software engineering is still a young discipline, with almost half a century since the coining of “software engineering”. Although we could claim some sort of success by simply pointing out the software underlying almost every facet of today’s world, that success has not been consistently repeatable nor teachable. As we become dependent on trillions of lines of code in the next 50 years, there is little comfort we still have no fundamental scientific understanding of how to create software.

TL;DR This post will speculate on possible directions and the challenges faced by the research and software engineering community that need to start now in order to be relevant tomorrow. Read on for brains, massive engineering, and potty-training your programs…

Many of the challenges faced by humanity in the next decades will require software that works at completely different scales and completely different constraints than today’s software. Previously, we’ve been able to make the distinction between programming-in-the-large and programming-in-the-small, when reasoning about the size of teams and types of tools needed to build software. While software continues to fit these situations, it is already diverging from these categories in several ways.

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