Grand Challenges of System Programming

Abstract

In 1969 the Second All-Soviet Programming Conference took place here, in Akademgorodok. One of the hot issues discussed at that conference was the problem of crisis of programming, which was proposed by Andrei Ershov. Indeed, programs were becoming bulky and complicated, and were swarming with errors; the programmer’s labor efficiency was thus low, and the development process hardly manageable. The laundry list of troubles can be continued. One can recall the dramatic story of developing the OS 360, which Brooks told in his “The Mythical Man Month”. The world has changed drastically over the past years, much due to the advances in computer science. Even the mighty OS 360 is, by today’s standards, an all-average program. But have all those troubles and problems been solved? No - and they’ve kept accumulating.