Semantic Werks

The study of the history of technology is one of great interest to me. I’m particularly interested in software engineering history, namely, how software-mediated technology has arisen, the forces that have shaped the solutions, and so on. I’ve written one paper on this, its subject the history of distributed computing (REST, RPC, CORBA, and others).

There’s a good general-purpose journal: Technology and Culture, which addresses a wide array of topics. There is also the Computer History Museum’s Software Industry SIG, and the IEEE Annals of History of Computing, but that’s about it. The focus also often veers into straight-up narrative, rather than a critical look at how/why certain things evolved.

I think it’s pretty clear why history matters, “those who forget ..” etcetera etcetera. An interview I watched the other day made the case that the inventor of LINQ, Anders Hejlsberg, isn’t ‘inventing’ so much as engineering: applying to Visual Studio and .NET the ideas behind LISP, Python list comprehensions, and so on. Of course this is still creativity in action, as Steve Martin would say. Because Hejlsberg understands his history he is able to leverage it (whether because he is well-read, was there for it, brilliant, or all of the above, I don’t know).

Here is the point, however: good history is not about dates and people, the ‘what happened’ narrative aproach, but ‘why‘: why REST, why Apache took off, why Perl has faded, why WS-* is despised … As you can see, there’s a lot to look at.