Skip to content(if available)orjump to list(if available)

On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules (1972)

On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules (1972)

4 comments

·March 3, 2025
Visit

bobbiechen

This paper is 50+ years old and yet programmers are still making the same mistake of defining modules based on a flowchart, instead of modules that hide design decisions. I think that shows the youth (and perhaps lack of foundational training) of software engineering as a field.

But also the progress of the last 50 years: the KWIC index went from “a small system [that] could be produced by a good programmer within a week or two” to a tiny system that can be written in a couple lines using the standard library of Java (as I once saw a demo of).

Also: I recently wrote a blog post related to this paper and all of the initial test readers told me they had no idea what a KWIC index was and it needed more explanation. Instant full-text search really changes things.

esafak

...and then came semantic search, and now we're onto AI search which just spits out the answer. I had not heard of KWIC either.

flafla2

One of my favorite ever papers and very ahead of its time. Thanks for the share :)

fdasdffda

[dead]