Software Engineering discussion

I don't think hardware being a bottle neck happens much in the world of PC development. I can see how it would be an area for contention on an older mainframe system.

I think embedded systems probably have pre-production hardware sharing issues in modern times. Many mobile devices run an OS, which have simulator environments that can run on a PC.

The section promoting high level languages is good but dated.

I was in the last intro to programming class at U of Illinois that used PL/I, punched cards, batch job, line printer output. This chapter reminded me of those days, and I am sure glad that those days are gone! I enjoyed the sales pitch on interactive programming and high-level languages.

It is interesting to see the beginnings of version control systems. I was surprised that debuggers and simulators and performance tools were available back then. As an aside, I would like to see a study of how often programmers use debuggers vs. print statements for debugging. My bet is they use more of latter, despite the incredible sophistication of modern debuggers.

Long ago, I would have predicted an increase in the degree of tool customization for an individual programmer, but the opposite seems to be happening. If you are an iOS programmer, are you really going to (or even able to) use something other than the Xcode suite? The growing dependency on libraries and frameworks narrows tool choice.