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Software Hall of Fame Member Ed Yourdon Dies (wikipedia.org)
New submitter andyjl writes: The software industry lost one of its pioneers on Tuesday, January 20, 2016 when Ed Yourdon died from post-operative complications. Ed was a pioneer of Structured Programming methodologies, and was a prodigious author of software-related books, including topics such as "death march" projects, and the problems of Y2K. He was also a personal friend and fellow forensic software analyst specializing in the analysis of failed software development projects and the lack of software development disciplines. He once told me that he read a item on the Internet (which I cannot find) that said, "whenever a programmer writes a GOTO statement, somewhere a Yourdon dies." I am forced to conclude that one of you programmers out there did indeed write a GOTO statement on Tuesday and I want to know who it was. Look at what you did! Did you really have to use a GOTO?
Adds reader theodp: Yourdon was a successful author, whose Slashdot-reviewed books included Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer, Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving "Mission Impossible" Projects, Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11 on Information Technology, and Outsourcing: Competing in the Global Productivity Race. Yourdon's Time Bomb 2000!: What the Year 2000 Computer Crisis Means to You!, written with daughter Jennifer, was a Y2K best-seller.
It was the f'ing compiler!
I swear, it keeps insisting on emitting all these conditional and unconditional branch instructions in assembly!
It's as if you couldn't write functional code in assembly without GOTO's or something!?!?!?
GOTO heaven
10 GOTO 10
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
GOTO, used properly, does not produce unstructured code. All the world's code would be a lot better if all programmers took a good class in compilers (and got a good grade) -- in this case to learn what "structure" means. I'm not arguing in favor of GOTO; it just serves to make my point.
Ed Yourdon
He was one of those guys who was hyping that the world was going to literally end because of the Y2k bug. And he was trying to sell his y2k books (Y2K Bomb 2000 or something) off of the hype. Pretty despicable if you ask me. I don't think he is worthy of an article here.
Remember the murder of Ian Murdock!
Ed Yourdon is in hell now. He's there because he didn't believe in Jesus Christ. There is no hope for Ed, who is now subject to eternal punishment with Satan and all the other demons. Please accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior now to ensure that you won't also suffer this fate.
Linus used gotos to a label at the end of some functions. It's a straightforward way to implement clean up that has to happen regardless if a failure occurs at some point in the function.
I'm a C programmer and I can use them safely :P
I had bought and read several of Ed's books before I met him; we became colleagues and then friends (albeit not close ones) about 15 years ago. It's been a year or two since we've swapped e-mails, but I continued to see his photography work show up on Facebook from time to time.
And I daresay many of those posting here have no idea how influential Ed was in software engineering developing as a discipline, starting nearly half a century ago. He pioneered and championed many concepts and practices that we would take for granted today, both in technique and process. I am so sorry to hear this. ..bruce..
Bruce F. Webster (brucefwebster.com)
Yourdon's methodology was one of the many object oriented methods I read up before the birth of the unified method, the publication of design patterns and the like. It didn't quite fit in my way of thinking then, but that might have been a notational issue. It was clear that each of these methods had been born from their specific context, that being the personal experience of the author in the industry.
I sat through some horrifically boring Yourdon oriented training.
What a waste!
Did he contribute any actual software - programs , libraries etc.
He seemed to make a good living from peddling his books.
I bought one and never repeated the mistake.
Other than his "wonderful" philosophic ideas what did he contribute?
I'm old and when I was young there were no Computer Science courses. I just started in that field from a similar area (as an Engineering student) and Yourdon books were among my favorites because of the way with which he described concepts and techniques. I learned a lot.
I have a special place in my heart for people who need to share knowledge like him, for what I'm grateful. I hope he's in a better place now.
Condolences for those who loved him and must stand the pain now; I think he made a difference and made the world a better place for many. I'm sure at least some will follow his example and steps.
A bit of satire from the 70's https://www.fortran.com/come_f...
Yourdon's book "Structured design: fundamentals of a discipline of computer program and systems design" was my first introduction to the idea of structure programming, and has continued to influence me simply by the idea that good design has a coherent rationale, and an overall structure. Sounds obvious? Not really.
Yeah, he got a little nutty with the TEOTWAWKI stuff about Y2K. Seems kind of quaint now.
Godspeed, Mr. Yourdon.
... to break out of a Lodash forEach loop, but that should have only grazed him.
If you post it, they will read.
Thank you.
One by one, they leave our lives,
leaving us with loss that we never expected.
(R)ule in Hell or (S)erve in Heaven [R]?
http://www.amazon.com/Decline-American-Programmer-Edward-Yourdon/dp/013191958X
Published in 1993, by 1999 everyone said he was wrong - they just didn't wait long enough. Though the reasons he gives for the decline (besides low-cost) were wrong and the solutions offered did not help; Software Processes,Software Methodologies,CASE,Software Metrics,Software Quality Assurance,Software Reusability.
If anything, they hastened the decline with lots of companies paying for expensive CASE tools that did little to improve software quality while slowing down the design cycle. It is very interesting to read the Amazon reviews and note the date of each review.
I had at least one of his books in the nineties, and while I remember him as making constructive contributions, there was always the code-correction smell of over promotion.
I'm pretty sure I bought one or two of his books via strong recommendations by P. J. Plauger.
These books weren't harmful, and actually set the stage for real learning, which came like one lightening bolt after another from some obscure tome by Edsger W. Dijkstra.
The ultimate difference being that one of these men could successfully preach to the enterprise, the other couldn't.
Sorry to hear of the passing of a peer.
Half a century sounded just about right for the decline and fall. I know where the others can GOTO. We will have time to swap stories later, about the Great Outsourcing, and other things.
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...which has its place in programming, in certain specific places. The GOTO haters have obviously never programmed in ASSEMBLER...
I haven't use GOTO since 1982. Must be someone else.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
In a software engineering forum, I argued that software engineering was mostly about human perception and not "external" rules of logic and math (beyond fitting objective tool requirements). I'll call it "perceptionists" versus "symbolists" here.
As an example, we debated whether it could be proven "go-to's are objectively worse than blocks" as far as software creation resources, quality, and maintenance.
The perceptionist side won the debate (although it can come down to definition interpretation). Blocks are easier to visualize due to indentation than go-to's, and thus aide in the visual identification of flow. There is no known visual equivalent for go-to's at this time, at least not practical ones.
That's important because the symbolists waste time and resources looking for or promoting some special math to guide software design when it's really mostly about the human mind. Just because something is easy to measure or process mathematically does NOT mean it's easy for the human mind to digest.
They accused me of promoting mediocrity and I accused them of trying to inflate the value of their profession, graduate-level university teaching, by inflating the value of minor ideas. Interesting debates, regardless.
Table-ized A.I.
you millennials that so derisively abhor Yourdon would never be hired in the first place in the 60-70s. I find the youngsters today arrogant beyond belief. The Yourdon era was a time of learning for the nascent SW development context. EE's had the concept of reusability long ago....I think we see a lot of maturity in SW regarding this concept today... Use what works...adapt to current day... But we will always have those snotty nose youngsters making fools of them selves...but not at the not at Yourdons derision. Buy a handkerchief for goodness sakes.
GOTO statements rock! Loops and structured programming are for losers.
I didn't know him, but I read two of his books.
In The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer he predicted Japan would overtake the United States in software development due to their use of CASE tools and zero defect tolerance culture.
In The Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer (which of course came later), Yourdon fessed up that his prediction was wrong. He attributed this to users being willing to put up with buggy software if they have benefit from new features.
Kind of bookend observations about our profession.