Re: Reminder, blatant ad

JOG wrote:
>
> This thread has got sidetracked down a very strange line. Software
> originally referred to the part of the pc that wasn't hardware, however
> this has evolved over the last half century, and software now generally
> denotes encoded machine instructions for the hardware to execute. If it
> isn't designed to be executed it's just common garden data.

Many many years ago i wrote a short piece titled something like "what does a programmer do?" (I was one, and had difficulties in bars explaining myself, and figured all Datamation readers had the same problem.). At the bottom of the page was a line something like "a programmer describes a procedure, in enough detail to be performed by a computer, to another programmer."

The forty year update? A software developer is one who writes to another software developer stuff that could be performed by a computer. And it might appear in a form (hardware) which a computer can read. The stuff is software.

Why is this important? It's like: what's an oil painting? Received on Thu Feb 02 2006 - 06:21:25 CET