Wrapping It All Up

Reading Alex E. Bell’s and Mark Guzdial’s “Viewpoint” columns in the August 2008 issue of Communications of the ACM, we were struck by the synergy of the two articles. One is a cautionary tale about the tools to use in professional software development, and the other is, at least in part, a cautionary tale about language and syntax use in teaching programming. This got us thinking about all the silver bullets we’ve tried in both development and education, and why most of them don’t matter to real software development. This seems like an appropriate way to wrap up this extended discussion on software development.