Keynote Speech to the 1996 Oopsla Convention

A video of this speech, without Jim Coplien's introduction, is on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA

>> Please forgive me, I'm going to be very direct and blunt for a horrible second. It could be thought that the technical way in which you currently look at programming is almost as if you were willing to be "guns for hire." In other words, you are the technicians. You know how to make the programs work. "Tell us what to do daddy, and we'll do it." That is the worm in the apple.

>> What I am proposing here is something a little bit different from that. It is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing. That would be remarkable. It would turn the world around, and make living structure the norm once again, throughout society, and make the world worth living in again.

It is amazing to me that Constantine got the idea for thinking about module design in terms of coupling and cohesion from Alexander's doctoral thesis, notes on the synthesis of form