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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

It’s a bit ironic that a decade or two ago, there was a drive to make software development look more like hardware development (as if it were somehow better), but the trend has swung all the way around.

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And stuff like Cleanroom worked to get the defect rate really low. The formal tooling of things like SPARK are pretty amazing now. Few adopted it but it happened. And like Karrot_Kream says, there's a small subset actually using those kinds of methods to their benefit. It's more than "dozens." Not mainstream by far, though.

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~al/cseet-paper.html

http://www.spark-2014.org/uploads/itp_2014_r610.pdf

What was this drive?

Using contracts, random verification, and formal verification methods to ensure the integrity of software blocks, I believe. There's still dozens of us out there, heh.

Not just that, but there was a genuine effort to make programming more like connecting together components on a board.

How was that different than ideas found in object oriented programming?

There were folks that believe you could instantiate objects graphically, and just connect them together and wire them up. Take a look at Java Spring Beans, which let you describe object instances through XML that either defines an object instance or wires up other instances together.

What you are mentioning sounds like LabVIEW (http://www.ni.com/en-gb/shop/labview.html). Incidentally it is widely used in semi-conductor industry.

I remind testing Java Studio as a student back in 1997, I guess that's Spring Beans spiritual ancestor.

A review with screenshots : https://www.javaworld.com/article/2076574/developer-tools-id...

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