First golden age: algorithmic abstraction

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Every few decades, software engineering is declared “dead” or on the verge of being automated away. We’ve heard versions of this story before. But what if it’s just the start of a new “golden age” of a different type of software engineering, like it has been many times before?

In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I’m joined once again by Grady Booch, one of the most influential figures in the history of software engineering, to put today’s claims about AI and automation into historical context.

Grady is the co-creator of the Unified Modeling Language, author of several books and papers that have shaped modern software development, and Chief Scientist for Software Engineering at IBM, where he focuses on embodied cognition.

Grady shares his perspective on three golden ages of computing since the 1940s, and how each emerged in response to the constraints of its time. He explains how technical limits and human factors have always shaped the systems we build, and why periods of rapid change tend to produce both real progress and inflated expectations.

He also responds to current claims that software engineering will soon be fully automated, explaining why systems thinking, human judgment, and responsibility remain central to the work, even as tools continue to evolve.

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Timestamps

(00:00) Intro

(01:04) The first golden age of software engineering

(18:05) The software crisis

(32:07) The second golden age of software engineering 

(41:27) Y2K and the Dotcom crash 

(44:53) Early AI 

(46:40) The third golden age of software engineering 

(50:54) Why software engineers will very much be needed

(57:52) Grady responds to Dario Amodei

(1:06:00) New skills engineers will need to succeed

(1:09:10) Resources for studying complex systems 

(1:13:39) How to thrive during periods of change

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The Pragmatic Engineer deepdives relevant for this episode:

• When AI writes almost all code, what happens to software engineering? 

• Inside a five-year-old startup’s rapid AI makeover

• Software architecture with Grady Booch

• What is old is new again

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