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Software Crisis
Software crisis is a term used in the early days of computing science for the difficulty of writing useful and efficient computer programs in the required time. The software crisis was due to the rapid increases in computer power and the complexity of the problems that could be tackled. With the increase in the complexity of the software, many software problems arose because existing methods were inadequate. History The term "software crisis" was coined by some attendees at the first NATO Software Engineering Conference in 1968 at Garmisch, Germany. Edsger Dijkstra's 1972 Turing Award Lecture makes reference to this same problem: Causes The causes of the software crisis were linked to the overall complexity of hardware and the software development process. The crisis manifested itself in several ways: * Projects running over-budget * Projects running over-time * Software was very inefficient * Software was of low quality * Software often did not meet requirements * Pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computing Science
Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to applied disciplines (including the design and implementation of hardware and software). Algorithms and data structures are central to computer science. The theory of computation concerns abstract models of computation and general classes of problems that can be solved using them. The fields of cryptography and computer security involve studying the means for secure communication and preventing security vulnerabilities. Computer graphics and computational geometry address the generation of images. Programming language theory considers different ways to describe computational processes, and database theory concerns the management of repositories of data. Human–computer interaction investigates the interfaces through which humans and computers interact, and software engineerin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Procedural Programming
Procedural programming is a programming paradigm, classified as imperative programming, that involves implementing the behavior of a computer program as Function (computer programming), procedures (a.k.a. functions, subroutines) that call each other. The resulting program is a series of steps that forms a hierarchy of calls to its constituent procedures. The first major procedural programming languages appeared –1964, including Fortran, ALGOL, COBOL, PL/I and BASIC. Pascal (programming language), Pascal and C (programming language), C were published –1972. Computer processors provide hardware support for procedural programming through a stack register and instructions for Subroutine#Jump to subroutine, calling procedures and returning from them. Hardware support for other types of programming is possible, like Lisp machines or Java processors, but no attempt was commercially successful. Development practices Certain software development practices are often employed with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Software Quality
In the context of software engineering, software quality refers to two related but distinct notions: * Software's functional quality reflects how well it complies with or conforms to a given design, based on functional requirements or specifications. That attribute can also be described as the fitness for the purpose of a piece of software or how it compares to competitors in the marketplace as a worthwhile product. It is the degree to which the correct software was produced. * Software structural quality refers to how it meets non-functional requirements that support the delivery of the functional requirements, such as robustness or maintainability. It has a lot more to do with the degree to which the software works as needed. Many aspects of structural quality can be evaluated only statically through the analysis of the software's inner structure, its source code (see Software metrics), at the unit level, and at the system level (sometimes referred to as end-to-end testin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tony Hoare
Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (; born 11 January 1934), also known as C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist who has made foundational contributions to programming languages, algorithms, operating systems, formal verification, and concurrent computing. His work earned him the Turing Award, usually regarded as the highest distinction in computer science, in 1980. Hoare developed the sorting algorithm quicksort in 1959–1960. He developed Hoare logic, an axiomatic basis for verifying program correctness. In the semantics of concurrency, he introduced the formal language communicating sequential processes (CSP) to specify the interactions of concurrent processes, and along with Edsger Dijkstra, formulated the dining philosophers problem. Since 1977, he has held positions at the University of Oxford and Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Education and early life Tony Hoare was born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to British parents; his father was a colonial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brian Randell
Brian Randell (born 1936) is a British computer scientist, and emeritus professor at the School of Computing, Newcastle University, United Kingdom. He specialises in research into software fault tolerance and dependability, and is a noted authority on the early pre-1950 history of computing hardware. Biography Randell was employed at English Electric from 1957 to 1964 where he was working on compilers. His work on ALGOL 60 is particularly well known, including the development of the Whetstone compiler for the English Electric KDF9, an early stack machine. In 1964, he joined IBM, where he worked at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center on high performance computer architectures and also on operating system design methodology. In May 1969, he became a professor of computing science at the then named University of Newcastle upon Tyne, where he has worked since then in the area of software fault tolerance and dependability. He is a member of the Special Interest Group ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Technological Singularity
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's #Intelligence explosion, intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive Recursive self-improvement, self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing all human intelligence.Vinge, Vernor"The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era", in ''Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace'', G. A. Landis, ed., NASA Publication CP-10129, pp. 11–22, 1993. - "There may be developed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
System Accident
A system accident (or normal accident) is an "unanticipated interaction of multiple failures" in a complex system. This complexity can either be of technology or of human organizations and is frequently both. A system accident can be easy to see in hindsight, but extremely difficult in foresight because there are simply too many action pathways to seriously consider all of them. Charles Perrow first developed these ideas in the mid-1980s. Safety systems themselves are sometimes the added complexity which leads to this type of accident. Pilot and author William Langewiesche used Perrow's concept in his analysis of the factors at play in a 1996 aviation disaster. He wrote in ''The Atlantic'' in 1998: "the control and operation of some of the riskiest technologies require organizations so complex that serious failures are virtually guaranteed to occur." Characteristics and overview In 2012 Charles Perrow wrote, "A normal accident ystem accidentis where everyone tries very hard ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
