The Market
Coming from one of the larger sophisticated users of machines, I have ample opportunity to see the tragic waste of current software writing techniques. At Bell Telephone Laboratories we have about 100 general purpose machines from a dozen manufacturers. Even though many are dedicated to special applications, a tremendous amount of similar software must be written for each. All need input-output conversion, sometimes only single alphabetic characters and octal numbers, some full-blown Fortran style I/O. All need assemblers and could use microprocessors, though not necessarily compiling on the same hardware. Many need basic numerical routines or sequence generators. Most want speed at all costs, a few want considerable robustness.
Needless to say much of this support programming is done suboptimally and at a severe scientific penalty of diverting the machine’s owners from their central investigations. To construct these systems of high-class componentry we would have to surround each of some 50 machines with a permanent coterie of software specialists. Were it possible quickly and confidently to avail ourselves of the best there is in support algorithms, a team of software consultants would be able to guide scientists towards rapid and improved solutions to the more mundane support problems of their personal systems.
In describing the way Bell Laboratories might use software components, I have intended to described the market in microcosm. Bell Laboratories is not typical of computer users. As a research and development establishment, it must perforce spend more of its time sharpening its tools, and less using them than does a production computing shop. But it is exactly such a systems-oriented market toward which a components industry would be directed.
The market would consist of specialists in system building, who would be able to use tried parts for all the more commonplace parts of their systems. The biggest customers of all would be the manufacturers. (Were they not it would be a sure sign that the offered products weren’t good enough.) The ultimate consumer of systems based on components ought to see considerably improved reliability and performance, as it would become possible to expend proportionally more effort on critical parts of systems, and also to avoid the now prevalent failings of the more mundane parts of systems, which have been specified by experts, and have then been written by hacks.
Present Day Suppliers
You may ask, well don’t we have exactly what I’ve been calling for already in several places? What about the CACM collected algorithms? What about users groups? What about software houses? And what about manufacturers’ enormous software packages?
None of these sources caters exactly for the purpose I have in mind, nor do I think it likely that any of them will actually evolve to fill the need.
The CACM algorithms, in a limited field, perhaps come closer to being a generally available off-the-shelf product than do the commercial products, but they suffer some strong deficiencies. First they are an ingathering of personal contributions, often stylistically varied. They fit into no plan, for the editor can only publish that which the authors volunteer. Second, by being effectively bound to a single compilable language, they achieve refereeability but must perforce completely avoid algorithms for which Algol is unsuited or else use circumlocutions so abominable that the product can only be regarded as a toy. Third, as an adjunct of a learned society, the CACM algorithms section can not deal in large numbers of variants of the same algorithm; variability can only be provided by expensive run time parameters.
User’s groups I think can be dismissed summarily and I will spare you a harangue on their deficiencies.
Software houses generally do not have the resources to develop their own product lines; their work must be financed, and large financing can usually only be obtained for large products. So we see the software houses purveying systems, or very big programs, such as Fortran compilers, linear programming packages or flowcharters. I do not expect to see any software house advertising a family of Bessel functions or symbol tabling routines in the predictable future.
The manufacturers produce unbelievable amounts of software. Generally, as this is the stuff that gets used most heavily it is all pretty reliable, a good conservative grey, that doesn’t include the best routine for anything, but that is better than the average programmer is likely to make. As we heard yesterday manufacturers tend to be rather