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An Overview of Recent Software History?
RobotWisdom asks: "Has anyone run across (or even heard of) an up-to-date overview of the most-important new subdomains for software applications? Inspired by the popularity of my timeline of Unix/Linux, for the last few months I've been working on a new timeline of AI, simulations, and knowledge-representation in general. Digging around online for links about simulation, for example, I discovered vast areas I was completely unaware of, mostly oriented towards the US military. In another context, I started noticing the TLAs 'SCM' and 'CRM' in relation to business software, and had to trackdown what they were all about. This morning I clicked on a banner ad for 'ModelSim' and discovered the TLAs 'HDL' and 'RTL' for simulating logic-chips. Another recent news item led me to the burgeoning field of medical simulations. But what I'm not getting is any sense of an overview of all these specialized domains, that seem to have emerged in software only in the last 30 years. Are there university classes that deal with this, giving a capsule portrait of each one? Textbooks?? Webpages???"
Go calculate something
Or am I missing the point? The timeline seems to be a bit vague in its point. Is it supposed to be landmarks in AI, important programs or what?
I would have loved to have had something like that when I was looking for my first job in Manhattan as a developer during the Boom.
Before I caught on that the acronyms being thrown at me during interviews were as much to test my ability to BS with the interviewers than to provide any real useful analysis on the spot, I took my failings at understanding them very hard.
Being clueless, I would slink home and look up my vocabulary holes on the web--ERP, ERM, PLM. What the hell were they talking about? All the definitions I found, beyond the literal meaning to the acronyms, seemed self-referential and had no meaning to me without a contextual detailed example.
But somewhere along the line, while working inside some organization, you hear the term enough that suddenly you find yourself using it too, to other people, and they somehow know what it means, even though providing anything beyond a literal definition is still hard.
Instead of glossary, I would have prefered some sort of Richard Scary type cartoon chart, the ones with the cutaway view of houses and fire stations. Something like that---a concrete example of what ERP is supposed to mean inside an organization proabably would have let me see exactly what it was supposed to mean. Not one of the those phony corporate charts, but one made by someone who has read and understood (at least partially) Tufte.
non nobis solum nati sumum
Yes. http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/
You will be absolutely lost the first time you visit the place, but after you get used to the design, it works very well.
The only downside is the number of 404's you'll get, especially to outside sites, but also to some stuff that should be a part of Robot Wisdom. Too bad. Even so, it's very impressive.
The overview is a probably a better entry page for new visitors.
Way to go, Jorn.